How to Add Final Cut Pro subtitles and captions

Subtitles and captions are incredibly important, especially for digital content creators. On-screen text helps your hard-of-hearing audience members, and for social media content, many of your viewers won’t listen to videos with sound.

If you’ve never used them in your projects before, don’t panic. Today, Motion Array will show you how to use Final Cut Pro subtitles and captions, making your videos accessible to the broadest possible audience.

Part 1: What’s the difference between Final Cut Pro subtitles and captions?

At first glance, Final Cut Pro subtitles and captions look very similar: Both are text appearing at the bottom of the screen. However, they each serve different purposes. 

In short, Final Cut Pro’s subtitles translate spoken dialogue into on-screen text and are frequently seen in foreign movies and TV shows. Subtitles assume that the viewer can understand the other audio cues, but needs the dialogue in a different language from the speaker.

On the other hand, Final Cut Pro’s captions display the translated dialogue and reference other audio cues in the video, such as music, sound effects (phone rings), and background noises. Captions assume that the viewer has no audio cues from the video and displays all crucial sound information in text form. This makes including captions a best practice for video accessibility.

Do note that subtitles and captions are different from adding Final Cut Pro titles and text on screen, and they can be used together in the same project.

Part 2: How to add Final Cut Pro captions and subtitles

Adding subtitles and captions is straightforward because Final Cut Pro offers a simple way to edit and format them.

Step 1: Create or import

Final Cut Pro offers 2 ways of creating subtitles and captions for your video. You can either import a .srt file or create them from scratch. A .srt is a time-coded transcription of the video, which will import all of the captions or subtitles into the project and lay them out in the right order. Many apps and websites offer transcription services, saving you huge amounts of time typing out long scenes.

To import captions or subtitles: 

1. With your project open, go to File > Import > Caption.
2. Choose your .srt file and select import. 
3. Final Cut Pro then auto-captions according to the time code in the .srt.

To create captions or subtitles from scratch:

1. With your timeline open, go to Edit > Captions > Add Caption. You can also use the Final Cut Pro shortcut Opt+C.
2. A small purple box will be added to the timeline. If you double-click the box, a window will appear for you to type in the text. You can add text to the Inspector window when the caption is selected.
3. Repeat these steps for all of your titles.

Step 2: Adjust and arrange

Once all your subtitles or captions are in the project, you’ll likely need to adjust the timings and rearrange them. When creating subtitles and captions from scratch, you can adjust the timings as you go. Unlike video editing in Final Cut Pro, the subtitles and captions aren’t magnetic, meaning you can move them freely around the timeline.

1. To Trim your Final Cut Pro subtitles or captions, grab the end of the text block and drag it to increase or decrease its length.
2. You can move the subtitles or captions around by selecting and dragging them. Be careful though, as they’ll overwrite other normal titles when placed on top of them!
3. If you want to duplicate a subtitle or caption, hold Option while you select and drag it.
4. To delete a subtitle or caption, select it and hit Backspace.

Step 3: Customize your text formatting

Once all your subtitles or captions are typed and in the right place, you can do some basic formatting to stylize them a little more. Remember, Final Cut Pro captions and subtitles are intended to be a simple solution for on-screen text. Other subtitling apps or editing software may offer more options.

1. You can make changes to individual or multiple subtitles or captions depending on your needs. Select the ones you want to format.
2. In the Inspector, you can change the placement of the subtitles or captions from the bottom to the top and back again. This can be helpful if your subtitles or captions risk obscuring important information on-screen, like lower thirds.
3. You can also change the color of the text in your subtitles or captions. Most will be white, but color formatting can be helpful when creating captions, offering different colors for dialogue, sound effects, and music audio cues. Color can also be used to indicate multiple speakers in a scene. 
4. Finally, you have 3 basic text options: Bold, Italic, and Underline, which you can use to emphasize specific parts of your text.

Step 4: Adjust for multiple languages (optional)

If you want to produce subtitles and captions in a variety of languages, you can do so using the Adjust Language options. Final Cut Pro captions and subtitles are added for each language you choose, maintaining all the time codes. However, Final Cut Pro won’t translate for you — you’ll still need to edit the text.

1. Select all of the Captions in the project.
2. Right-click and go to Duplicate Captions to New Language.
3. From the menu, choose the language you’d like to add.
4. Go through the new Final Cut Pro captions and change the text to the appropriate language.

Step 5: Export a caption or subtitle role

Once you’re satisfied, you’ll need to export the video from Final Cut Pro. If you do a regular export, the captions won’t be included in the final video so you’ll need to take a couple of extra steps.

1. Go to File > Export or press Cmd+E to open the export window.
2. Complete your standard export options, choosing where to save and what to name your video.
3. Select the Roles tab at the top of the export window.
4. Next to Video Track is a small Captions icon. Click on it to reveal the captions menu.
5. Click the dropdown menu next to Burn in Captions and choose the text you want to include in the export.
6. Click OK. The window will close and you’ll notice that your chosen captions are listed under Video Track. 
7. Continue to export as usual.

Part 3: Pro tips for working with Final Cut Pro subtitles and captions

1. Exporting

Through Final Cut Pro, each set of subtitles or captions will need to be exported separately. However, you can send each video version to Compressor, where you can set them to export all at once. This means you can get straight back to editing while your videos are created in the background.

1. When finished, go to File > Send to Compressor.
2. A window will pop up: Select the text you want to burn to the video from the dropdown menu. Hit Send.
3. Compressor will open and your video will appear in the queue. 
4. Continue sending to Compressor with each variant.

2. Transcriptions

While it’s a requested feature, Final Cut Pro auto-captions still need to be added to the program, so you must rely on third-party options. Transcription applications can save you a lot of time typing out your text, but they can be a bit inaccurate. Voice-to-text functions, meanwhile,  may not always get it right, depending on the language and accent. 

When you upload a video to YouTube, it will create closed captions for you, which can be downloaded as a .srt. If you need, you can tweak them into subtitles, too, by removing the additional caption information. 

An excellent shortcut for long videos is to upload them to YouTube as a private video, download the .srt, and use that as a base to start adjusting and correcting your captions.

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Final Cut Pro subtitles and captions are an easy-to-use solution for your subtitling needs. The application is limited in terms of how much you can change the look of the text, but Final Cut Pro is one of the simplest options on the market. You can check out Motion Array’s other Final Cut Pro tutorials to expand your skills, too.

Now that you know how to use this feature, you can maximize your potential audience and know that your video is accessible to people who may be able to see, but not hear, your work.