Add Subtitles to YouTube Shorts

What the Shorts player draws over your video

A Short plays full screen, and YouTube layers its controls straight on top of the picture. Along the right edge sits a column of buttons for liking, disliking, comments, sharing and remixing, with the sound or music link near the bottom of that column. Across the lower part of the frame you get the channel avatar and name, a subscribe button, and the title, which can run onto a second line. The top edge carries search and a menu, and a thin progress bar can appear along the very bottom.

None of those positions is published as a fixed pixel grid, and they move a little between app versions, phone sizes and the desktop player. Treat any template you find as approximate. The practical rule holds anyway: the bottom fifth of the frame and a strip down the right side are contested, and the area just under the centre is the calmest place for words.

The editor's "Show safe area" guide recognises a 9:16 frame and marks a deeper margin at the bottom than at the top, with room at the sides. It is a general title-safe guide rather than a copy of YouTube's overlay, and it only appears in the preview; nothing from it is drawn into the video.

Burned in, uploaded in Studio, or both

A Short is an ordinary video as far as YouTube Studio is concerned, so it can carry a caption track like any other upload. That gives you two routes, and they don't exclude each other.

Burned-in subtitles

Drawn into the picture by the editor on this page. Every viewer sees them, on every device, with no setting to find. They also travel with the file if you repost the clip to TikTok or Reels. They can't be switched off or searched.

A caption track in Studio

An SRT or VTT file uploaded under Subtitles, or YouTube's automatic captions. Viewers have to switch captions on, which on a phone means finding the option in the player menu, so many never will. The text stays editable after publishing.

Doing both is reasonable if you also want a track that YouTube can read. Just remember that a viewer who turns captions on will see two sets of words, so keep the burned ones in the middle and accept that YouTube's track sits lower. Export SRT from the same session gives you that file. If you would rather start from the captions YouTube already made, editing YouTube's auto captions shows how to download and fix them, and uploading an SRT to YouTube covers the Studio side.

Captioning a Short, start to finish

1. Open the editor on this page and pick the vertical clip from your computer: MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV. The Style tab starts on Social Media.
2. Keep "Write the subtitles automatically with AI" switched on for a draft from the speech, or turn it off and use Import SRT / VTT, or press Enter at the playhead to type a line.
3. Play the Short from the top with the sound up and correct names, numbers and slang in the line list as you go.
4. Tick "Show safe area" and watch a few lines land. If a line meets a face, move it with the "Nudge up / down" slider rather than shrinking it.
5. Check the final second of the clip, where the loop restarts, and trim or move any line that hangs over the cut.
6. Click Render video, start the render from the summary, keep the tab open, then Download video. Use Export SRT as well if a Studio caption track is part of your plan.

Rendering runs in a desktop browser; YouTube Studio accepts uploads from a computer, so the file can go straight from your downloads folder to YouTube.

The editor won't change the shape

Rendering keeps the source's resolution, frame rate and orientation. A 1080×1920 clip comes back as 1080×1920, and a horizontal clip stays horizontal; the editor neither crops nor pads anything to 9:16. If your Short starts life as a slice of a 16:9 video, reframe it to vertical in your video editor first, then caption the vertical export. Captioning the wide version and cropping afterwards tends to slice the ends off longer lines.

Text size is measured against the shorter side of the frame, which on a vertical clip is its width. So the size you settle on for a 720-wide draft looks the same on the 1080-wide master. Social Media starts at size 7 with a narrower Max line width than the default, which keeps the block compact and away from the right-hand buttons. If you prefer the look of yellow outlined capitals, the Creator preset sits slightly lower in the frame and is just as compact. How far either look gets you toward feed-style captions is covered on the TikTok caption style page; there is no word-by-word highlighting or motion here, each line simply appears and disappears.

Captions that survive the loop

Shorts replay automatically, so the end of your clip runs straight into its beginning. A few habits make subtitles feel deliberate rather than broken when that happens:

• Put a caption on the very first frame if the first word is spoken immediately. AI lines start on the first spoken word, so a hook that begins at 0.0 seconds should already be covered; check it.
• Don't let a line straddle the seam. If someone is mid-sentence when the clip ends, either cut the sentence in your editor or end the caption on the last word that is actually heard.
• Hold the last line long enough to read. The editor warns when a line is on screen for under 0.8 seconds, and those short tails are common at the end of Shorts.
• Keep the rhythm tight. AI captions are short single lines of about 32 characters, which suits a phone; Split breaks a longer line at the playhead and Merge joins it with the next one.
• Watch the reading-speed warning. Above 21 characters per second most viewers can't keep up, and fast-talking Shorts trip it often.

Three Shorts, three set-ups

A last look before you post

Play the downloaded MP4 on your phone, not just in the preview, and watch one full loop with the sound off. If you can follow the clip without audio and no line hides under the title or buttons, it's ready. If you are captioning the long-form video the Short came from, subtitles for a full YouTube video weighs uploaded captions against burned ones for that format, and the subtitle generator turns speech into an SRT when the file is all you need.

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