How to add captions to YouTube Shorts

Two kinds of captions on YouTube Shorts

There are two ways to get captions onto a Short, and they behave very differently. Closed captions are a separate text track: YouTube can generate them automatically from speech, or you can upload a subtitle file such as SRT or VTT in YouTube Studio. Viewers only see them if they switch captions on, and on Shorts the captions control is less prominent than on regular videos, so most viewers never see them

Burned-in captions, sometimes called open captions, are part of the picture. Everyone sees them, on every device, with or without sound, and you control the font, size, colour, position and animation. This is the style you see on most successful Shorts: big words in the middle of the screen, often highlighting each word as it is spoken

The two are not mutually exclusive. Burned-in captions win attention in the feed; a closed-caption file helps accessibility tools and gives YouTube clean text for the spoken content. Doing both takes very little extra work if your editor exports a subtitle file from the same transcript

Using YouTube's automatic captions

YouTube generates automatic captions for many uploads in supported languages, usually some time after upload. You can review and edit them in YouTube Studio under Subtitles. They cost nothing and need no editing software, but they are plain text, they only appear when a viewer turns captions on, and automatic transcripts can get names and jargon wrong until you correct them

If your Short has no burned-in text, auto captions are better than nothing. If you want people scrolling with the sound off to follow along, they are not enough on their own

Adding burned-in animated captions

To burn captions in, transcribe the audio with word-level timing, fix any mistakes, choose a style and export. Word-level timing matters: it lets each word appear or highlight exactly when it is spoken, which is what makes animated captions feel in sync rather than lagging behind the voice

In shitShorts, captions come from a Whisper transcript timed to each word. You pick a caption theme such as karaoke, boxed or pop, and switch themes without re-timing anything. Every caption is an editable layer on the browser timeline, so correcting a word or splitting a line takes seconds. Export the MP4 with the captions burned in, and from the Studio you can also save the same captions as an SRT or VTT file to upload to YouTube as closed captions. If you are clipping a long video, the clipper adds the captions as part of making each clip

Where to place captions on a Short

The Shorts player covers parts of the frame. The channel name, title and audio label sit at the bottom, and the like, dislike, comment and share buttons run down the right side. On a 1080x1920 frame, keep captions out of roughly the bottom fifth and away from the right edge; the middle third of the screen, slightly below centre, is the safest place

Keep each caption to two or three short lines, use a heavy font with an outline or a box behind it so it reads on any background, and do not let captions cover a speaker's mouth or eyes. Caption themes in shitShorts are placed inside these safe areas by default

Captions on clips cut from a long video

If your Short is a clip from a longer video, caption it after the cut, not before. Captions timed to the original video drift once you trim it, and re-timing by hand is slow. An AI clipper that captions each clip from its own word-level transcript avoids the problem: the captions start on the first word of the clip and end with the last one, and they move with the cut if you trim it later in the timeline

The same applies to closed captions. Export a fresh SRT for each Short rather than reusing the subtitle file of the full video, so the timings match what viewers actually see

Tips that make captions work

Write numbers as digits, keep the speaker's wording but cut filler words like 'um' if they clutter the screen, and highlight one or two key words per line in a brand colour instead of everything. If the Short opens with a hook line, show it as larger text for the first two or three seconds, then let the regular captions take over

Captions, caption themes, editing and export cost no credits in shitShorts on any plan, including the free plan. Free exports are 720p with a small watermark; paid plans export at 1080p and above without one