Burned-in captions
Burned-in captions are subtitles rendered directly into the video's pixels during export, making them a permanent part of the image that always displays, in contrast to closed captions which are a separate track the viewer or platform can switch off.
There are two ways to put words on a video. A caption track sits alongside the video as data, and the player decides whether to show it. Burned-in captions are painted into the frame itself at export time, so there is nothing to switch on and nothing to switch off.
Why short-form uses them
The great majority of short-form video is watched without sound, often in a feed that autoplays muted. A clip whose captions depend on the viewer enabling them is a clip most people watch in silence. Burning them in removes that dependency entirely.
They also survive re-uploading. A clip downloaded and posted elsewhere keeps burned-in captions and loses a caption track, which matters when clips are meant to travel.
The trade-offs
- →They cannot be turned off, translated by the platform, or restyled later.
- →A typo means re-exporting the video rather than editing a text file.
- →Automated systems cannot read them as text, so they contribute nothing to search indexing on their own.
- →They must respect the platform's safe zones, or interface elements will cover them.
Doing both
The strongest approach is to burn captions in for the watching experience and also upload a caption file where the platform accepts one. The viewer gets words on screen by default; the platform gets machine-readable text for search and accessibility.
Clipd burns word-synced captions into every clip.
See captions in action