What is Burn-in Captions?
Burn-in captions are subtitles rendered permanently into the video frame during export, so the text is part of the picture and cannot be switched off by the viewer.
Updated · Editorial policy
Burned in or a sidecar
Burning in, also called hardcoding or open captions, composites the caption text onto the pixels of every frame at export. The alternative is a closed caption track: an SRT file or a platform-generated track that rides alongside the video and is drawn by the player. Hardcoded text keeps the font, colour, stroke and word-by-word animation you designed. A sidecar file hands all of that to the player's own styling, and gains the ability to be switched off, translated or indexed.
Why reposting decides it
Burned-in text survives being moved. A clip downloaded and re-shared, embedded in someone's newsletter, or played through a feed that strips metadata loses a sidecar track and keeps a burned-in one, and short-form feeds autoplay muted, so the captions carry the opening. The cost is that burned-in text is monolingual and uneditable: a misspelled guest name means a fresh export, and a second language means a second render. Keep the text inside the safe zones so the platform's own caption bar and title overlay do not cover it.
What most creators do
Split by format rather than choosing once. Vertical shorts get burned-in captions in a readable sans-serif with a heavy stroke or shadow; long-form horizontal uploads get an uploaded SRT, because that text feeds YouTube's transcript panel and search and lets a viewer turn it off. Descript lists Hobbyist at $24 per month, checked 1 October 2026, and Kapwing lists Pro at $24 per month, checked 6 October 2026; both burn in and export a sidecar from the same transcript. Rev charges $1.99 per minute for human transcription, checked 6 October 2026, which is the route when accuracy on names and jargon matters more than speed. The Descript and Kapwing comparison covers the editing side, and the transcription and captions category lists the rest. Our creator resources include the caption style checklist.
Frequently asked questions
Can you remove burned-in captions?
Not from the exported file, because the text is part of the picture. You re-export from the project with the caption layer changed or hidden. This is the main argument for keeping the editable project and the transcript rather than only the finished video.
Do burned-in captions hurt SEO?
They are not readable as text, so they contribute nothing to search indexing or to a transcript panel. On long-form uploads where discovery matters, upload an SRT as well. Burning in is about surviving reposts and muted autoplay, not about being found.
Which is better for short-form video?
Burned in, in almost every case. Short clips get downloaded, re-shared and replayed in feeds that drop sidecar tracks, and the styled word-by-word look that short-form audiences expect is only achievable by rendering the text into the frame.