Before you get started, two things need to be true, and if either one of them isn’t, this whole workflow is a non-starter. You need to be on at least DaVinci Resolve 18.5, because that’s the version where Blackmagic added automatic captions, and you need to be running the Studio version, because the auto captions feature sadly is not included in the free version of Resolve.

Assuming you’re good on both of those, here’s the whole process.

Do Your Captions Last

You want to have your video edited and basically finished before you touch captions, because adding them is the final step you take before exporting.

The reason it’s the final step is that if you end up needing to make any changes to your video, especially to the length of it, you’re going to have to recreate all these captions again so they sync properly with your audio. Do it last and you only do it once.

Check Your Audio Tracks First!

This is the step most people skip, and it’s the one that saves you the most cleanup later.

Before you generate anything, look through all the audio tracks on your timeline and confirm those are actually the tracks you want captions for. Say you’ve got an audio track with someone speaking that you don’t want captioned, maybe there’s a TV playing in the background, or someone talking quietly off to the side. You don’t want Resolve transcribing any of that.

In my case here I’m captioning some toasts from a wedding I filmed, and I have on-camera audio on the first two tracks that I’m going to mute, because I don’t want captions made from the on-camera audio. I want them made from the audio recorder I used to get high quality audio, because better audio means more accurate captions.

Don’t stress about this either. You can temporarily mute your audio tracks, create your captions, and then unmute everything afterward.

Automatically Create Subtitles From Audio

Make sure you’re on the Edit page with your timeline open, then go up to the Timeline menu at the top and select Create Subtitles from Audio.

That brings up a dialog box with a handful of settings, and here’s what I’d actually do with each one:

• Language. Leave it on Auto unless Resolve gets confused. Generate your captions, look at them, and if they come out weird then come back in here and set the language manually, which should make things more accurate.
• Caption preset. You’ve got options including Teletext and Netflix. Unless you’re literally delivering to Netflix, Subtitle Default is fine.
• Maximum characters per line. The default of 42 is good. Lower it if you want less text on screen at a time.
• Lines. One line or two. Completely up to you. I’m a fan of single for simplicity and cleanliness, but bump it to two if you’ve got someone talking a lot and you want more text on screen.
• Gap between subtitles. Leave it at zero and you’ll be fine.

Click Create, and Resolve analyzes all the audio on your timeline in the background and builds subtitles out of it. How long that takes depends on your computer and the length of your video. On my machine a ten minute video takes about 30 seconds.

When it’s done you’ll see a brand new track called Subtitle 1 sitting at the top of your timeline, above all your video tracks.

In my experience Resolve makes pretty accurate captions by default, and they look really good.

Correct Any Transcription Errors

You should absolutely read through your captions and make sure they’re accurate. But do not sit there dragging your playhead across the timeline going “okay that one looks good, and that one looks good.” That takes forever.

Instead, click on any one of your subtitles, and over on the right in the Inspector panel you’ll notice it switches to a subtitle view that lists not just the caption you clicked, but every caption in the timeline. You can read straight down the list, and whenever you spot something wrong you just click into it and fix the text right there.

One thing worth knowing: if you’re only seeing a few captions in that panel, click the little down arrow and it expands so you can read a lot more of them at once. Makes the whole review go much quicker.

Sidecar File Or Burned In?

This is where you have a decision to make, and it comes down to two options.

You can bake the captions into your video, where they’re permanently part of the video file and always visible. Or you can save them to a separate file, also called a sidecar file, that gets uploaded alongside your video to YouTube or Facebook so viewers can toggle captions on and off.

I typically go with the sidecar approach, so let’s cover that one first.

How To Create A Sidecar SRT File For YouTube, Facebook Etc

Once your captions look the way you want, go up to File > Export Subtitle, give the file a name, and click Save.

Notice it saves as an SRT file. That format is accepted by pretty much every video playback platform out there and it’s what lets viewers turn captions on and off.

I always save my SRT into a captions folder inside the video project folder that holds all the video and audio clips for that project, so I always know exactly where it is.

To get it onto a YouTube video, find your captions file, then head to YouTube Studio, go to edit your video, click Subtitles, hit the three dots, and select Upload file with timing. Press continue, select your SRT, and it’s uploaded. Now people can toggle captions on and off while they watch.

Customize Font/Color/Background & Burn Captions Into Your Video

Burning them in is genuinely simple, and it’s also the option that lets you heavily customize how your captions look.

Go back to the captions Inspector on the right, but instead of staying on the Caption tab, select the Track tab. This matters. The Caption tab is for editing one individual caption, so anything you change there won’t affect the rest of them. The Track tab is where you format every single caption at once.

From here you can adjust the font, and you can actually watch it change live as you scrub across the options, which is very cool. You can adjust the stroke outline, so if it’s white by default you can make it black and bump up the size to get a nice clean outline on your text. You can add a drop shadow with a bit of offset. You can even add a background behind the text, which starts looking like the captions you’d see on TikTok.

And please, whatever you do, don’t use Comic Sans. I tried it for the sake of demonstration and I genuinely couldn’t look at it. Arial is nice. Arial is safe.

If you do want to change one specific caption, that’s easy too. Go back to the Caption tab, tick the Customize Caption box, and now you can change the font, capitalize a word, make it bigger, or turn it red to emphasize a moment. You get a ton of control from that one checkbox.

Export Your Video With Burned In Captions

Head to the Deliver page, the rocket ship icon at the bottom, and set up your export like normal with your file name and settings.

If you want to know the absolute best settings for exporting out of Resolve, and grab my free export presets while you’re at it, I put together a full guide to the best 4K export settings for DaVinci Resolve that will save you a lot of time.

Then here’s the one step people miss. Go all the way down to the very bottom left to Subtitle Settings, hit the dropdown, scroll down a bit, and check Export Subtitle. Then, instead of leaving Format set to a separate file, select Burn into video.

Now add to render queue, render all, and your video exports with every caption burned right into it.

That’s The Whole Thing

Captions used to be one of the most tedious parts of finishing a video, and now it’s a couple of menus and a review pass. Get your edit locked, mute the tracks you don’t want transcribed, generate, read through the list in the Inspector, and then decide whether you want a sidecar SRT or captions burned in.

If you want to get faster at the rest of your editing too, you can download my Edit Videos Like A Pro guide completely free. It covers some of the biggest lessons that took me years to learn as an editor.