How to Add Open Captions to a Video Automatically: 2 Best Ways (Online, Premiere Pro)

Home >
Learn >
Video Editing Tips >
How to Add Open Captions to a Video Automatically: 2 Best Ways (Online, Premiere Pro)

Last Updated: 2023. 09. 25

Adding open captions to your video makes it easier for people to read your video with eyes in public or quiet places and makes your video content accessible to viewers hard of hearing.

Besides, for social media like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook that do not support SRT or TXT files for closed captions, adding open captions to your videos proves to be indispensable in engaging and reaching wider viewers.

So, in this tutorial, we will briefly explain what the open caption is and the difference between option caption and close caption and walk you through how to automatically add open captions to your video online and in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Preview

ChatGPT YouTube Tutorials

Use This Template

Preview

Lyric Travel Slideshow Video

Use This Template

Here is what you will learn:

What Does Open Caption Mean

Open Caption VS Close Caption, Any Difference

How to Automatically Add Open Captions to a Video Online

How to Automatically Add Open Captains to a Video in Premiere Pro

Also, read how to transcribe MP3 to text.

What Does Open Caption Mean

Open captions or burned-in captions refer to the captions that have been embedded into the video. Viewers can’t turn off the open caption in a video as it is part of the video content.

Add open captions to a video or a movie.

Open captions are widely used in movies, esp. foreign films. So, you can easily read the open captions and follow the narratives in the movie.

Open Caption VS Close Caption, Any Difference

	Open Captions	Closed Captions
Turn on/off	Embedded into the video; can’t be turned off	A separate text file from the video; can be turned off
Availability	Available to all social media and online and offline viewing	Available only to online social media and desktop media players that support uploading SRT/TXT files.
Edit	Can’t be edited after it is burned in a video	Can be edited online or in some desktop media players

So, it’s highly recommended to add open captions for videos on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Snapchat that do support closed captions. For YouTube videos, you may use either closed captions or open captions.

How to Automatically Add Open Captions to a Video Online

If you don’t have a desktop video editor that can help you automatically add open captions to videos, then using a versatile online video maker can be a great solution. In this case, the user-friendly and feature-packed FlexClip AI video maker is one of your go-to choices.

Effortlessly add open captions to your videos by FlexClip online.

Create Now

With FlexClip, you can:

Harness the AI auto subtitle generator to automatically transcribe video and audio to text for open captions with one click. It supports 140+ languages with diverse accents and promises over 90% accuracy. You can edit the captions’ style and time codes with ease.

Automatically add open captions to videos by FlexClip online.

Add Open Captions Now

Directly download the open captions in SRT, VTT, SSA, ASS, SUB, and SBV files for closed captions on YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, or your blog posts, translations, or other repurposings.

Directly download the open captions or video transcript in srt and other formats.

Besides, you can use thousands of designer-made and fully customizable video templates, covering travel, sports & fitness, YouTube/TikTok/IG Reels, webinars, explainer videos, movie trailers, podcast intros & outros, birthday/wedding/memorial slideshows, lyric videos, promo & sales, holidays, etc. With easy drags and drops of your video assets, you can create a compelling video in minutes.

Preview

Minimalistic Music Podcast Intro & Outro

Use This Template

Preview

Tech Mobile App Promo Video

Use This Template

Preview

Cinematic Film Title Credits

Use This Template

Preview

Golden Memorial Video Captions

Use This Template

What’s more, as a fully-featured AI video maker, FlexClip also offers you other helpful AI tools to automate your video editing process and reclaim chunks of valuable time. From the AI video script generator, fueled by ChatGPT, to lifelike text-to-speech generator, text-to-video generator, and text-to-image generator, image background remover, and audio extractor, etc. you can unleash your creativity and create captivating videos like no other.

Seamlessly convert text to realistic AI voices by FlexClip online.

Use Free TTS

Step 1

Access FlexClip > upload your video assets from your PC, Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, or even Google Photos.

Upload your video assets to FlexClip.

Step 2

Click the plus sign to add your video to the intuitive timeline > you can trim or split the clip when needed.

Add the video to the intuitive timeline.

Step 3

Automatically add open captions to the video.

Click the Subtitle tab > Auto AI subtitle > identify the language in the video > hit Next > select the style of open captions > press the Generate button. Now, sit back and sip your coffee while the AI shall auto-transcribe the video to text for you.

Automatically transcribe videos to text for open captions in your video.

Add Open Captions Now

Now, you can playback the video > proofread the AI-generated open captions > edit any misspellings > scroll up to click the download button and save the video transcript in SRT, VTT, SSA, ASS, SUB, SBV file for closed captions on YouTube, or repurpose it for your blog posts, newsletters, translations, or other repurposings.

Edit the auto-generated open captions and download the subtitles in srt and other subtitle formats.

Or tweak the style of open captions, such as text font, text size, color, alignment, color and opacity of background fill, position, italics and boldness, etc.

Customize the style of open captions in the video.

If you find one subtitle too long, you can press Enter to split it or click the Merge tool to combine two short subtitles with ease. Pretty handy!

Easily split or merge open captions in videos.

Step 4

Jazz up your video with text animations and royalty-free music & sound effects.

Click the Text tab > scroll down to select from 1,000+ ready-made and editable text animations for your video titles and call-to-cations, such as YouTube/TikTok/Reels’ profile titles, Like, Share, and Subscribe buttons, and lower thirds, news titles, speech bubbles, and quotes, callout titles, search bars, and location title, etc. Please feel free to explore.

Add editable text animations for video titles and CTAs in the video.

You can easily customize text styles or click the Motion tool to animate the text with diverse animations for text reveal, such as typewriter, cinematic glitter, blur, fade, burst, bounce, neon, etc.

Easily animate the text with styles.

Create Now

By clicking the Audio tab, you can choose from 74,000+ royalty-free music tracks and sound effects to bring your video to life. You can layer multiple upbeat audio tracks for sound design or add “swoosh”, “whoosh”, “impact”, and “pop-up” sound effects for text reveal. Just feel free to play with it.

Add royalty-free music and sound effects to further spice up your video.

Step 5

Preview and share.

Done with the editing. You can click the Export button to save the 1080P MP4 video to your computer or directly share it to YouTube, Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, or even TikTok; a clickable link is also available for your blog posts, newsletters or other repurposings.

Easily share and repurpose your video content.

How to Automatically Add Open Captains to a Video in Premiere Pro

For Premiere Pro users, now you can update your PR to the latest version to enjoy a powerful speech-to-text feature to automatically transcribe the video to text and later manually set the caption to burned-in captions and export the video along with the open captions.

Automatically add open captions to a video in Premiere Pro.

Step 1

Add your clips to the timeline in Premiere Pro > go to the workspace and click Captions and Graphics > go to the Text panel > click the Captions tab.

Open the caption window in Premiere Pro.

Step 2

In the Caption window > click Transcribe Sequence > select the language you want to transcribe, and which audio track to be transcribed > hit the Transcribe button.

Automatically transcribe the sequence in Premiere Pro.

Step 3

Go through the transcribed texts and correct spelling mistakes > click Create Captions button > select the style of captions > and hit the Create button. Then the captions will show up on the caption track on the timeline. You can stylize the details of the captions, such as fonts, text size, fill background color, the maximum length in characters, single/double lines, etc. on the Essential Graphics panel.

Create the captions by adding the transcript to the subtitle track in PR.

Step 4

Click the Export button > Captions > select Burn Captions into Video > export the video with an open caption from PR.

Export the video with burned-in captions or open captions from Premiere Pro.

Now, It's Your Move

Compared with closed captions, adding open captions to your video allows your videos to reach wider audiences on all social media. And it’s highly recommended. So, start using FlexClip or PR to burn captions into your video now! If you find this tutorial helpful, do share it on your Facebook and Twitter and leave your thoughts and tag us. Much appreciated!

Add Open Captions Now

Frank /

Passionate about photography, video-making and travel, Frank is a seasoned copywriter and a beloved father of 2-year-old daughter at FlexClip. He is always keen to share his latest discovery about video marketing and tricks to relive your memories through videos and images.