Captions are no longer optional — they increase engagement by 40% on social media and are required for accessibility compliance. Premiere Pro's built-in AI makes the process fast.
Auto-Generating Captions
- Open your sequence and go to Window > Text
- Click Transcribe Sequence and select the language
- Wait for AI processing (typically fast, a few minutes per hour)
- Click Create Captions — choose format (Subtitle or CEA-608)
- Captions appear as a track in your timeline, synced to the audio
Editing and Styling
- Click any caption segment in the Text panel to edit the text
- Adjust timing by dragging caption edges in the timeline
- Style in the Essential Graphics panel: font, size, background, position
Export Options
Burned-in (Open Captions): Captions render directly into the video file. Best for social media where platform captioning is unreliable.
Sidecar file (Closed Captions): Export as .srt or .vtt alongside your video. Best for YouTube, Vimeo, and web players where viewers can toggle captions on/off.
Pro Tip
For social media, use large bold captions (minimum 40pt) with a dark background or stroke. On mobile screens, small subtitles are unreadable. We style social captions at 48-56pt with a semi-transparent black box behind the text.