Add Russian Subtitles to a Video

Before you open the editor

Three decisions save time later.

• Where the Russian comes from. Russian speech is transcribed as spoken; speech in English or another supported language can be translated into Russian; a finished SRT or VTT can be imported as it is.
• Which font. Cyrillic is drawn natively by ten of the 19 fonts. Pick one of them up front so you don't restyle twice.
• Where the video goes. A landscape YouTube upload can carry two lines comfortably; a vertical clip with large text leaves room for very few long Russian words per line.

Adding Russian subtitles, step by step

1. Launch the editor here and load your Russian or foreign-language clip from disk; MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM and MKV are accepted.
2. With "Write the subtitles automatically with AI" switched on, leave "Subtitle language" on auto-detect for Russian speech, or choose Russian to translate from another language. Press AI subtitles and sign in with Google. To use your own file, switch AI off and import it.
3. Watch the video through and correct the lines. Pay most attention to names, numbers and case endings, which change a word's meaning.
4. In the Style tab, check the font name against the Cyrillic list below and change it if needed.
5. Press Render video, start the render from the summary, then save the MP4 with Download video. Export SRT as well if a platform should get a separate caption file.

The AI pass costs 1 credit per minute of video: a 30-minute webinar is 30 credits (3¢). Typing, importing, styling and rendering cost nothing.

Fonts that carry Cyrillic

The editor's font stack falls back to Noto fonts for scripts such as Arabic, Devanagari and the East Asian scripts, but not for Cyrillic. If you pick a font without Cyrillic, Russian letters are drawn in your device's system font instead, which looks like a different design and can shift between computers. Stay with a family that has its own Cyrillic:

Sans-serif

Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Montserrat, Noto Sans

Serif

Noto Serif, Merriweather, Playfair Display, Lora

Display

Oswald

Lato, Poppins, Mukta and Cairo among the sans-serif faces, and Bebas Neue, Anton, Bangers, Archivo Black and Baloo 2 among the display faces, have no Cyrillic in the editor.

The presets matter here too. Classic and Minimal use Inter, YouTube uses Roboto, Creator uses Montserrat, Cinema uses Noto Serif and High Contrast uses Noto Sans, so all of those draw Russian properly. Modern and Social Media use Poppins: keep their look, but switch the font to Montserrat or Inter. If you want a tall condensed headline style, Oswald is the only display face with Cyrillic. The best fonts for subtitles compares the faces visually.

Long words and how lines wrap

Russian has plenty of long words: достопримечательности (sights) has 21 letters, and compounds such as высокопроизводительный run longer. The editor wraps Russian at spaces only and doesn't hyphenate, so each word moves to the next line whole.

That works well at normal sizes. The edge case is big text on a narrow frame, such as the Social Media preset on a 9:16 clip. If one word is wider than the whole line, it is cut between letters without a hyphen, which Russian readers will notice. The fixes, in order of preference:

• Reduce the font size a step, or widen the max line width in the Style panel.
• Reword the line so the long word sits alone, or choose a shorter synonym.
• Use a narrower face; Oswald fits noticeably more letters per line than Montserrat.

The editor's warnings use the same limits as most Latin-script languages: a line longer than 42 characters (it still wraps) and reading faster than 21 characters per second. AI output arrives as single lines of about 32 characters, each up to about 2.6 seconds long. For vertical framing in general, see subtitles on vertical video.

When the Russian is a translation

Choosing Russian under "Subtitle language" translates the recognised speech; an imported file isn't translated. Some things to check in the result:

• Length. Russian often needs more characters than the English it came from, so translated lines hit the reading-speed limit more often. Text expansion in translation explains the pattern.
• Timing. Translated lines are timed by their share of the text, not by the spoken words. Drag the edges of any line that appears early or lingers.
• Names. Foreign names are transliterated into Cyrillic, and the same person can end up spelled two ways in one video. Choose one form and use it throughout; translation vs transliteration shows how the two differ.
• Address. Decide whether the video speaks to viewers as ты or вы, and keep it consistent; a tutorial that switches mid-way reads oddly.
• Ё. Russian text often writes е in place of ё. Either is acceptable in most contexts, but pick one style for the whole file.

Burning translated subtitles has a broader review routine for translated lines.

If something looks off

Some letters look like a different font

The chosen font has no Cyrillic, so the system font is filling in. Switch to one of the ten families listed above.

Imported file shows � symbols instead of Russian

The SRT was saved in an older Cyrillic encoding such as Windows-1251, and the editor reads subtitle files as UTF-8. Re-save it as UTF-8 and import it again.

A word is broken in the middle

It is wider than the line. Reduce the size or widen the max line width.

Lines flash past

Over 21 characters per second. Shorten the wording or extend the line into the gap that follows.

Whole file runs late

Use "Shift all by" to move every line earlier by the same amount.

Where else to go

For a Russian transcript without subtitles on screen, Russian video to text gives you the text with timestamps. To give Russian speakers a voice track instead of reading, the Russian video translator dubs the video, and in the other direction the Russian to English video translator handles Russian footage for English viewers. If you only need an SRT file, the AI subtitle generator creates one without rendering a video.

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