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.
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.
CaptionCandy 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; with Candy Ultra 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.
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
95 styles, 21 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 CaptionCandy 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 and unlimited on every plan — minutes are only ever spent on Candy Ultra transcription, never on rendering. Free exports carry a small corner watermark; paid plans remove it.
More ways to use CaptionCandy
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