Burned-in captions
Burn subtitles into video — permanently.
Hardcode captions into the pixels, or export a soft SRT track. One transcript, both outputs, and no upload step for your footage.
Burning subtitles into a video means painting the text permanently into the picture itself, so it cannot be turned off, restyled or lost — the same thing people call hardcoded subtitles, burned-in captions or open captions. LumaCaption transcribes your video, lets you style the captions, and exports a burned-in MP4 without ever uploading the video file.
Two very different things get called “subtitles”. Burned-in — hardcoded — captions are painted into the pixels of the video itself: always on, identical everywhere, impossible for a player or a platform to restyle or switch off. Soft subtitles are a separate SRT or VTT track riding alongside the file, which the player draws, the viewer can toggle, and a search engine can read. Neither is the better one. They solve different problems, and knowing which problem you have is most of the decision.
LumaCaption produces both from a single transcript. Open a video, get every word written and timed to the audio, then render a burned-in MP4 — 1080p free, up to 4K on paid — or download a clean SRT, VTT or TXT, or take both. Your video file is never uploaded — only the extracted audio travels.
Baked into the pixels
A burned-in export survives everything downstream — reposts, re-encodes, downloads, someone screen-recording your clip. There’s no caption track to lose because there’s no track.
Soft SRT from the same words
SRT, VTT and TXT downloads are free on every plan, including free. Use them for YouTube’s caption track, for LinkedIn, or wherever an accessibility requirement needs a real subtitle file.
No upload, no queue
Most SRT burners want the whole file on their server before anything starts. Here your footage never travels, so a 2 GB master begins immediately instead of crawling up your connection first.
Permanent, but not risky
Burning in is irreversible, so the styling has to be right. Re-exports cost nothing on any plan — bake it, watch it on your phone, change your mind, bake it again.
Hardcoded, burned-in, open — the same thing under four names
The vocabulary around this is a mess, and the words are used interchangeably by people who mean exactly one thing: text that lives in the pixels. If a search result promises one of these, it is promising the others too.
The genuine distinction is not between these names. It is between text painted into the frame and text carried in a separate file that a player draws on top — soft subtitles, closed captions, an SRT or VTT sidecar. That second kind can be toggled, restyled by the viewer, read by a search engine, and lost in a re-upload. The first kind can do none of those things, which is the point.
- Burned-in
- The editing term. The captions were rendered into the video during export.
- Hardcoded / hardsubbed
- The same thing, from fansubbing and encoding communities.
- Open captions
- The accessibility term — open because nobody has to switch them on.
- Soft subtitles / closed captions
- The opposite: a separate SRT or VTT track the player renders and the viewer can turn off.
If you already have an SRT file
Be clear about what LumaCaption is, because it is not this. LumaCaption writes the subtitles for you — it listens to the audio, times every word, and burns the result in. It does **not** import an SRT you already made and burn that. If your captions are already written and timed and you only need them baked into the picture, this is the wrong tool and you should not pay for it.
For that job, ffmpeg does it in one line — `ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf subtitles=captions.srt out.mp4` — and HandBrake exposes the same thing as a "Burn In" checkbox on the Subtitles tab. Subtitle Edit can drive ffmpeg for you from a GUI on Windows. All three are free.
Where LumaCaption is the right answer is when the SRT is what you are missing, or when you want the captions to *look* like something. A burned-in SRT is plain white text in the player default. The word-by-word timing, the animation and the 290+ styles only exist if the captions were built as a design object in the first place.
Burning is irreversible, so get these right first
There is no undo on a baked frame. Once the export is written, changing a typo means re-rendering, and if the master is gone you are re-cutting from scratch. Four things are worth checking on the preview before you commit.
- Safe area
- Instagram, TikTok and Shorts all put UI over the lower third. Drag the caption block up until it clears the platform chrome, then check on a phone rather than a laptop.
- Resolution
- Burn at the resolution you will publish. Captions baked at 1080p and upscaled to 4K go soft in a way the footage does not.
- Spelling of names
- Transcription gets ordinary words right and proper nouns wrong. Names, brands and product terms are the ones to read before exporting, not after.
- Contrast over the busiest frame
- Scrub to the brightest, noisiest shot in the clip and judge legibility there — not on the title card.
Burned-in captions vs a soft SRT
| Burned into the picture | Soft SRT / VTT file | |
|---|---|---|
| Viewer can switch off | No — always visible | Yes |
| Survives re-upload and reposts | Yes | Usually lost |
| Styling, fonts, animation | Anything you can render | None — player default only |
| Read by search engines | No | Yes — YouTube indexes and translates it |
| Fix a typo later | Re-export the video | Edit the text file |
| Cost on LumaCaption | 1080p free, 4K on paid | Free on every plan |
Most people take both from the same edit: a burned-in MP4 for social, and the SRT for YouTube’s caption track or an accessibility requirement.
How it works
Pick your video
Drag in the file. Every word is transcribed and timed at the word level, not the line level.
Style it before you bake it
290+ styles, 47 of them full-frame kinetic typography scenes. Set colour, font, position and the auto-highlighted keyword until the preview is exactly what you want permanently in the picture.
Export hard, soft, or both
Burned-in MP4 at 1080p free and up to 4K on paid, or an SRT/VTT/TXT file free on every plan — all from the same transcript.
Common questions
What’s the actual difference between hardcoded and soft subtitles?
Hardcoded captions are part of the image — the same pixels as your footage — so they can’t be turned off, restyled by the player, or stripped when someone downloads and reposts the clip. Soft subtitles are a separate SRT or VTT track that the player reads and draws itself: toggleable, restyleable by the viewer, and readable by search engines. Burned-in wins on control of the look; soft wins on accessibility and indexing.
Which one should I use?
Burned-in for Reels, TikTok and Shorts — those feeds autoplay muted, almost nobody taps a CC button, and hardcoded text survives every repost and re-download. Soft SRT for YouTube long-form and LinkedIn, where the player has a proper caption UI and the words get indexed. For a long video that also gets clipped, do both: an SRT on the upload, burned-in captions on the clips.
I already have an SRT file — can I burn that in?
The flow here runs the other way: you bring the video and LumaCaption writes its own transcript from the audio, timed word by word. That’s usually better material to burn than an existing SRT, because a typical subtitle file only knows where each block starts, while burned-in captions look right when the timing is per word. Every word stays editable, so fixing a name or a number takes seconds.
Does burning captions in cost me quality or a fee per render?
Neither. Exports render at 1080p on the free plan and up to 4K on Creator and Pro, and they’re free, unlimited and watermark-free on every plan — minutes are only ever spent on Candy Ultra transcription, never on rendering.
