Move Subtitles to the Top of a Video

Reasons to leave the bottom of the frame

Bottom-centre is the default for good reasons: viewers look there by habit, and it's usually the calmest part of the picture. Moving subtitles up makes sense when something else needs that space.

• Name titles and lower thirds. Interviews, news-style pieces and webinars often put a speaker's name and role along the bottom.
• On-screen text in the footage itself: slides, charts, product labels, scoreboards or a ticker.
• Old subtitles burned into the picture that you're replacing in another language.
• Vertical video on social apps, where the caption, account name and buttons cover the lower part of the screen.

Broadcasters handle the first two by lifting subtitles to the top only while the bottom is busy. This editor positions all lines together, so the question becomes which single position works for the whole video, as the sections below explain.

How position works in this editor

• Position is part of the style, and the style covers every line in the video. There's no setting for an individual line.
• Three anchors, Top, Middle and Bottom, set the starting point. Top and Bottom sit just inside the safe-area margin rather than against the very edge of the frame.
• The Nudge up / down slider moves the text from its anchor by up to 45 per cent of the frame height either way. Positive values move it up, negative values move it down, and choosing a different anchor resets the nudge to zero.
• With Top selected, a two-line subtitle grows downward into the picture. With Bottom selected, it grows upward. Keep this in mind when checking long lines.
• Text is never pushed outside the frame, however far you nudge.
• Size is measured against the video's shorter side, so a position set on a 1080p preview lands in the same place on a 4K render.

Moving subtitles to the top, step by step

1. Open the editor, choose your video and get the subtitles in, either from AI, an imported SRT or VTT file, or typed lines.
2. Open the Style tab and scroll to Position. Click Top.
3. Tick Show safe area. A dashed rectangle marks the margins for your video's shape, labelled 16:9, 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 or 4:3, or Custom for anything else.
4. Scrub to the busiest moments: the longest subtitles, any two-line subtitles, and any shots with text or faces near the top of the frame.
5. If the subtitles sit too close to something important, drag Nudge up / down. A small negative value lowers them a little from the top edge.
6. Check Max line width and alignment in the Text section. A narrower line width keeps long subtitles from spanning the full frame.
7. Click Render video and download the MP4. The guide rectangle is only shown in the preview and isn't drawn into the video.

For the dimensions of the margins on each platform, the subtitle safe area page has the details.

Top, middle or bottom?

Bottom

Right for most landscape video with nothing important along the bottom edge. Viewers find it without looking.

Top

Right when the bottom is regularly occupied by titles, slides, scoreboards or old subtitles. Watch for faces: in close-ups, top subtitles can sit across foreheads and eyes.

Middle with a nudge

Common for vertical video, where both the top and the bottom of the screen carry app overlays. The Social Media and Creator presets already use the middle anchor, nudged down below centre.

Landscape players often show their own controls along the bottom when paused or hovered over, which is one more reason some creators raise subtitles slightly even when the frame itself is clear.

When one position isn't enough

Sometimes the bottom is busy for only a few seconds, such as a name title at the start of each interview answer. Since every line shares one position, you have three honest options.

• Choose the position that suits most of the video, and reword or retime the few lines that clash so they don't coincide with the titles.
• Render in two passes. Export an SRT of all lines first as a backup. Delete the lines that should stay at the bottom, set Top, and render. Then open the rendered MP4 as a new video, import the full SRT, delete the lines already burned in at the top, set Bottom and render again. It works, but the video is encoded twice, so a little more quality is lost.
• Use a desktop video editor where each caption is its own clip that can be positioned separately. Adding subtitles in DaVinci Resolve is one free route.

Subtitle files don't carry this position

The position you set lives in the rendered video. SRT and VTT exports contain only the text and the times, and when a player or platform loads them, it places them wherever it normally does, usually at the bottom.

The formats do have their own ways of asking for a position. WebVTT has cue settings that can set a line's height, and some players also honour a position tag inside SRT text, the most common being the code an8 for top centre. Support is uneven, though, and many platforms ignore both. This editor doesn't read these settings when importing and doesn't write them when exporting. If the subtitles must appear at the top everywhere, render them into the picture. Burning subtitles into the video explains that trade-off, and embedded versus sidecar subtitles compares the two types.

A short pre-render check

• The longest subtitle fits inside the safe-area rectangle without touching a face or a title.
• Two-line subtitles at the top don't reach down into the important part of the frame.
• Contrast holds up against what's behind them; skies and ceilings are often brighter than floors. Customizing subtitles covers outlines and boxes.
• If you're hiding old subtitles with the blur band, the new ones sit clear of it or deliberately on top of it.

For the thinking behind placement conventions, subtitle positioning is a good companion read. If you still need the subtitles themselves, the AI subtitle generator or the editor's own AI option will write a first draft.

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