Add subtitles to a video

You need a subtitle file first

Octoolo does not listen to a video and write captions by itself. It takes captions someone has already written, with their times, and puts them on the picture. Those come in two common kinds of file:

• SubRip (.srt), the most widespread: for each caption, a number, a line of times such as 00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:06,500, and then the words.
• WebVTT (.vtt), the web's own: the same idea, with WEBVTT on the first line and dots in the times.

Transcription services and many recording, meeting and editing apps can save one. You can also write one yourself in a plain text editor such as Octoolo's Text Studio, which opens and saves .srt files. Octoolo reads the times, drops formatting tags such as italics, and keeps the line breaks. If it says No captions were found in that file, open the file and check that its times look like the example above.

Burned in, not switched on and off

There are two kinds of subtitles. Burned-in ones are part of the picture, like a title. Soft ones are a separate track that the viewer turns on in a player. Octoolo makes burned-in subtitles, which has clear upsides:

• They show everywhere: on phones and TVs, in feeds that play videos muted, on sites that ignore subtitle tracks.
• They look exactly as you styled them, not as each player decides.

And two downsides: viewers cannot turn them off, and one video holds one language. For two languages, export two videos. Keep a copy without captions as well, because they cannot be taken out of the exported picture again.

If a video already has soft subtitle tracks, Convert video files keeps its text subtitles when it converts to MP4, MKV, MOV or WebM. It cannot add a new .srt file as a track.

Making captions easy to read

Captions arrive in the Caption style: white text on a dark, see-through box near the bottom, centered. It is made to be read over any picture, so many videos need no changes. To adjust one, click it:

• Font: Clean, Bold, Classic, Typewriter or Handwritten, with Size, Bold, Italic and CAPITALS.
• Behind the words: a Box in any color, an Outline, a Shadow, or nothing.
• Drag the caption on the video to move it. Long lines wrap so they stay inside the frame.

Each caption is its own text item, so a change of style is made one caption at a time; there is no setting for all of them at once yet. That makes it worth deciding on a look before you edit a long file line by line. On vertical videos, keep in mind that the short-video apps cover the bottom of the screen with controls of their own.

Fixing timing problems

Captions are placed at the times written in the file and stay there. They do not move with the clips, which leads to the usual problems:

• All of them late or early: the subtitle file was made for a different cut. Trim the video to match the file, or cut first and then shift the captions that need it.
• One caption off: click it and change Starts at or Lasts, in seconds to the tenth, or drag it along the Text lane.
• Captions missing at the end: anything timed after the last clip ends is not exported.

The captions are drawn on the exported video exactly as the preview shows them, so play the video through once before you export: what you see is what the MP4 will hold. For a few lines without a file, add them by hand as described in add text to a video.