Add Italian Subtitles to a Video

Before you start

Three things decide how smoothly this goes.

• The file. MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM and MKV open directly from your computer. Anything else needs converting first, for example with HandBrake, and a video on a website needs downloading, because the editor doesn't take links.
• Where the Italian comes from. Italian speech is transcribed as Italian. English, Spanish, French or any other of the 21 supported languages can be translated into Italian on the way. An Italian SRT or VTT from a translator simply imports.
• A Google sign-in, but only when AI writes the text. It costs 1 credit per minute of video, and the 100 credits a new account receives cover more than an hour and a half of footage.

If what you really want is the spoken Italian as a document rather than as subtitles, Italian video to text produces a transcript you can edit and share.

How to add Italian subtitles to a video

1. Choose your video in the editor on this page.
2. Under the AI option, open "Subtitle language". Keep auto-detect if people speak Italian; pick Italian if they speak another language.
3. Press "AI subtitles". Only the audio is uploaded, compressed and over HTTPS; the frames of the video never leave your machine.
4. Play from the beginning with the line list open. Up and Down jump between lines, Space pauses, and clicking a line opens its text for editing.
5. In Style, start from a preset and adjust size and position, checking the widest line, because Italian lines run long.
6. Press "Render video", keep the tab open while it encodes, then press "Download video".

Skip the AI toggle entirely if a translator already delivered an Italian file: import it, check it against the speech and render. Then neither the video nor the text leaves your computer and no account is involved.

È, é and the E' habit

Italian marks stress on final vowels: città, perché, più, così, and the verb è. Whisper writes these correctly from clear speech. The trouble usually arrives in text typed by people, because the standard Italian keyboard has no key for a capital È. That is why so many files contain E' at the start of a sentence, and from there the apostrophe habit spreads: perche', piu', cosi'. On screen, in large type, it looks careless to an Italian reader.

• È (it is) and words like caffè and tè take the grave accent; perché, poiché, affinché and né take the acute.
• On a Mac, holding e down offers both è and é, and the capital versions with Shift. On Windows, Alt+0200 types È on the numeric keypad.
• If a client sends an SRT, scan for an apostrophe right after a vowel at the end of a word. That pattern is nearly always a missing accent.

Elisions and where lines break

Italian merges words with an apostrophe all the time: l'uomo, dell'acqua, un'altra, c'è, quest'anno. The editor breaks lines only at spaces, so an elided article always travels with its noun; you won't find dell' stranded at the end of one row with acqua on the next.

Two smaller points. Un'altra takes an apostrophe because it is feminine, while un altro does not, and typed files get this wrong often enough to be worth a glance. And straight and curly apostrophes both render fine, but a mix of the two in one video shows at large sizes, especially in serif faces such as Lora or Playfair Display. Pick one form and keep it.

Why Italian needs more room

The same idea usually takes more letters in Italian than in English, and translation makes that visible line by line.

Translated subtitles are split by text length, so their timing per line is approximate, and extra characters in the same stretch of speech push the reading speed up. The editor flags any line faster than 21 characters per second. Shorten the wording ("Grazie della visione"), merge with the next line when there is a pause, or extend the line's end into the silence that follows. The background is explained in text expansion in translation, and the timing tools in changing subtitle timing.

Keep in mind too that cinema and television in Italy have long dubbed foreign productions, so part of your audience reads subtitles less often than viewers in subtitling countries. Leaning toward slightly slower, shorter lines costs little and helps them.

Fixing common problems

• If a line shows before the speaker starts, drag its left edge on the timeline; it snaps in 10 ms steps.
• If two lines overlap, the editor marks both. Pull back the end of the first.
• If every line is late by the same amount, usually an SRT made for a different cut of the video, use "Shift all by" once instead of moving lines one at a time.
• If a town or product name is wrong throughout, correct each occurrence; Up and Down make the pass quick.
• If loud music sat under the speech, retype the affected lines. Recognition can't hear through a heavy soundtrack.
• If the text looks small on a phone, raise the size. It scales with the video's shorter side, so a value that suits 1080p suits 4K too.

Variations

If you need a subtitle file in Italian rather than a video, the AI subtitle generator and subtitles in another language produce SRT and VTT. To replace the voice instead, translate the video to Italian with AI dubbing.

About the subtitle editor on this page

Opens

MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, MKV videos your browser can decode

Subtitles from

AI (from the speech, optionally translated into one of 21 languages), an SRT or VTT file, or typing them in

You download

An MP4 with the subtitles drawn into the picture at the original resolution and frame rate, plus SRT and VTT files

Cost

Editing, styling, rendering and SRT/VTT export are free, with no account and no watermark. AI subtitles cost 1 credit per minute (5-credit minimum per video); signing in with Google gives 100 free credits and accounts get 10 free credits a day

Privacy

The video never leaves your device and is rendered in your browser. Only for AI subtitles is the audio sent, over HTTPS, and it is deleted within 30 minutes of delivery

Rendering needs

Chrome or Edge 94+, Safari 16.4+, or Firefox 130+ on a computer. Editing and SRT/VTT export work in any current browser