You can add captions with pretty much any video editing tool. We’re going to tell you how to do it in Descript because a) we think it’s the best, and b) this is our website.

With Descript’s automatic transcription and Fancy Captions you can add open captions to your videos in seconds.

Before you apply Fancy Captions decide if you want to add captions to your entire video, or only a portion. Either way, it’s easy.

Add captions to your entire video

• If you want to add text to the entire video, select all the transcript just like you would in a doc — using the keyboard shortcut Command + A for MacOS and Ctrl + A for Windows or simply click on “Edit — Select All.”
• Return to the toolbar, click the (+) button, and type Fancy Captions in the dialogue box. You can also use Command + K to use the Conductor, then type Fancy Captions. Then click on it.
• Once you select it, Fancy Captions will automatically apply transcription to your video.

You will notice a Fancy Captions icon — a T in a purple box — at the beginning of your transcription. This indicates where your caption begins, which you will see as a separate track on your timeline. You can drag and drop that icon anywhere in the script, wherever you want captions to start.

If you click on the icon, or on the purple captions track in the timeline, you can you then click on the Clip Inspector (in the top right of the app) to change any of your captions’ properties, including the font, size, or color. You can also add animations and shadows.

Add captions to a portion of your video

What if you only want to add captions or subtitles to particular sections of your video project? You can insert them by highlighting just the part you want to caption, then following the second and third steps above. Once you’ve added them, you can expand or shrink the section with subtitles using your Fancy Captions track (the purple line). Just use your mouse:

• To move your captions click the Fancy Captions track and drag it left or right.
• To extend your caption track simply click the end or beginning of the Fancy Captions track and drag it left or right.

Create social media clips with captions

You can also repurpose short clips of your video to for social-media promotion — complete with animated captions. It couldn’t be much simpler:

• Select the portion of your video you want to use for a clip.
• Right click and select Click to Composition → New. That will create a new Composition consisting of just the content you selected.
• Click on the new Composition, highlight all of the text and follow the second and third steps in the Add captions section above.

Here again, you can change the color, size, or font of your captions, add animations, or throw in some scroll-stopping animations like waveforms or progress bars.