How to Add Subtitles to a Video in Your Browser

Many people watch video with the sound off, and subtitles also make a clip easier to follow in a noisy room or in a language you are still learning. DepCut writes them for you from the speech in your video, lets you fix any word, and shows every style as a live preview, all in the browser editor.

What you need

A DepCut account. The editor runs in your browser at depcut.com.
A video on your project's timeline, with someone speaking in it.
Some credits. Generating subtitles uses your account credits, so check your balance first.

Step 1: Generate the subtitles

Open your project and click Subtitles in the left panel.
Choose the language spoken in the video, or leave it on Detect language. The list has English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese.
Click Generate subtitles.

Transcription runs in the background, so you can keep editing while it works. When it finishes, the captions appear in the panel and over your video.

Step 2: Fix the text

Open the Content tab. Your transcript is laid out as paragraphs of captions, each with a timestamp. A long pause in the speech starts a new paragraph, and a shorter pause shows as a marker between captions. Edit any caption right in the list to correct a name, a brand or a word the transcriber got wrong.

If you re-cut the video and want fresh captions, click Regenerate. It transcribes the cut again and replaces the current captions, and you can undo it.

Step 3: Pick a style

The Styles tab draws every style as a live preview of the look. DepCut ships ten: Clean, Curiosity hook, Big & punchy, Minimal, Editorial, Typewriter, Block, Highlighter, Bubblegum and Neon. Click one and the captions on your video switch to it. Styles you have saved yourself appear under My captions.

Step 4: Fine-tune the look

The Options tab holds the details:

Font and size, including a font you upload yourself.
Word highlight and colors, pop-in, glow and lean.
Show subtitles, a switch that hides the captions without deleting them.

Anything you leave alone follows the style, and Reset to style puts every change back. To move the captions, drag them on the video. Reset under Position returns them to the style's own spot.

Step 5: Export

Export your video as usual. The captions are burned into the picture, so they travel with the video to whichever platform you post it on, with no separate subtitle file to upload.

Tips for better captions

Start with clear audio. Music that is louder than the voice is the usual reason a word comes out wrong.
Pick the language yourself when you know it. Detection is there for when you do not.
Check names, brands and numbers first. They are what a transcriber is most likely to miss.
Drag the captions away from faces and on-screen text so nothing is covered.

Try it on your next video

Open DepCut, drop in a clip, and generate your first captions in a few clicks.