Professional Captions for Business and Client Videos

What separates professional captions from quick ones

Viewers rarely notice good captions; they notice bad ones. On business video the difference usually comes down to five things:

• Correctness. Names, job titles, product names, figures and acronyms are exactly right.
• Consistency. Every video in a series uses the same font, size, colour and position.
• Restraint. No novelty fonts or loud colours; captions support the message instead of competing with it.
• Timing. Lines appear with the speech and stay long enough to read.
• Accountability. There is an approved version of the text that the client signed off, and the delivered video matches it.

None of that depends on expensive software. It depends on writing the rules down and checking against them every time.

Write a one-page house style

Agree the rules once, ideally with the client, and keep them where everyone on the project can find them. A workable sheet covers these rows:

Font

One of the 19 bundled fonts closest to the brand typeface. Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato or Montserrat cover most sans-serif brands; Merriweather or Lora suit serif ones. The editor can't load a custom brand font file, so agree the substitute in advance.

Size and position

Bottom, default offset, with the size value written down. Note any exceptions, such as moving to the top for screen recordings.

Colour

White text with a black outline, or white on a dark box at a fixed opacity. Record the exact colour values and opacity.

Case and punctuation

Sentence case; how numbers, currencies, dates, job titles and product names are written; whether to keep filler words such as "um".

Line rules

One line where possible. The editor flags lines longer than 42 characters and anything faster than 21 characters per second.

Non-speech information

Whether to caption music and sound cues, and how speakers are identified. AI subtitles add neither, so both are manual.

One practical point: the editor doesn't save a custom style as a reusable preset, and each new video opens with the page's starting style. Your work on a given video is kept as a draft in the same browser, but the next video needs the house values entered again. A sheet with the numbers on it turns that into a two-minute job.

Brand colours without hurting legibility

Brand colours are often mid-tones, a corporate blue or a signature red, and mid-tones make poor caption text because they lack contrast against both dark and light footage. If the brand must appear, put the colour in the box background with white text on top, at an opacity high enough to keep contrast over bright shots. Often the better call is neutral captions and a logo in the corner doing the branding. Test any choice over the busiest and brightest footage in the edit; caption backgrounds compared shows how box, outline and shadow behave.

A review routine that survives sign-off

1. Before generating anything, collect a list of names, titles, product terms and figures from the client. If you use AI subtitles, this list is what you'll check against.
2. Bring in the draft: AI subtitles from the speech, or Import SRT / VTT if a transcript already exists.
3. First pass, words only. Read the line list while the video plays and correct every name, number and term; Up and Down arrows step through lines quickly.
4. Second pass, timing only. Watch at normal speed, fix lines that flash or overlap, and clear the warnings the editor shows beside each line.
5. Apply the house style in the Style tab, render a review copy and send it to the client with the exported SRT, which they can read in any text editor.
6. Make the requested changes. Reopening the same video file in the same browser restores your lines and style, for up to five videos at a time.
7. Render the final MP4, and file the approved SRT next to it so the text of record is kept with the delivery.

AI drafts are a time saver, not a finished product: fixing auto-generated subtitles describes where errors cluster, and the subtitle quality check article lays out a formal QC pass with sign-off records.

Corporate formats and their quirks

• All-hands and town halls. Long recordings with several speakers. AI subtitles handle videos up to two hours, but they don't label speakers, so add names or dashes by hand where speakers change. A 25-minute recording costs 25 credits, or 2.5¢.
• Training videos. Slides and software screens carry text of their own. Move captions to the top or reduce their size so they don't cover the content being taught; training video translation covers versions in other languages.
• Interviews and customer stories. If name titles are already burned into the lower third, remember that position applies to every line, so set the captions to sit clear of the titles throughout.
• Ads and product demos. Mostly watched with the sound off, so captions carry the message; captions for video ads covers that job.
• Multilingual delivery. AI subtitles can translate the speech into any of 21 languages, and translated subtitles explains how. For human translators, a reviewed source-language SRT can serve as a timing master, an approach described in the subtitle templates article.

Accessibility as part of the job

Business video increasingly reaches people who rely on captions, not just people watching with the sound off. Captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers name the speaker when it isn't obvious and describe meaningful sounds; those have to be added by hand. Burned-in captions can't be resized or restyled by the viewer, so where the player supports caption files, deliver the SRT or VTT as well. The difference is explained in open versus closed captions.

Small mistakes that look amateur

• A product name capitalised three different ways in one video.
• A caption that flashes for a fraction of a second because a line was split carelessly.
• A line break that separates a number from its unit, or a first name from a surname.
• Captions sitting on top of a speaker's name title or a slide's key figure.
• Two videos in the same series with visibly different caption styles.
• The chief executive's name still in its misheard form from the AI draft.

Each of these is quick to fix and obvious to a client. Typographic conventions such as italics, dashes and numbers are covered in the subtitle formatting article. If you only need a caption file and the client's own team handles rendering, the subtitle generator delivers SRT and VTT directly, and the online SRT editor is there for revisions.

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