Smart Captions turns your sequence into styled captions on the timeline: word-by-word karaoke highlighting, boxes, strokes, shadows, pop animations and auto-placed emojis — the social-video caption look, rendered and placed for you.
It works in two stages: transcribe and edit the text, then design the look. The first stage is the exact same editor as Subtitles Pro — this page covers the design stage.
Works in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.
Quick Start
Transcribe
Open Smart Captions, set the language and caption limits, and click Transcribe. See Subtitles Pro for the transcription settings — they’re identical. Fix the text
Correct any wrong words and caption breaks now. Text is not editable after the captions are rendered.
Add emojis (optional)
Click Auto Emojis to have one picked per caption. The Animated switch makes them animated emojis.
Design Captions
Click Design Captions to open the style panel.
Style and preview
Adjust the design — the preview updates on a real frame from your timeline.
Apply to Project
Pick an Export Location, then click Apply to Project.
Smart Captions handles sequences up to 30 minutes. Rendering animated captions is far heavier than a plain transcription, hence the tighter limit than Subtitles Pro.
Captions arrive as rendered clips, not editable text layers. You can move, trim or delete them, but you cannot retype a word. Get the text right before you leave the transcription stage.
The design panel
Preview
The preview shows your captions over a real frame from your timeline. Two buttons sit in its corner:
- Refresh Styles — re-renders the caption with your current settings.
- Refresh Timeline Frame — grabs a new frame at the playhead.
Drag the caption in the preview to set where it sits in frame. Drag the emoji to place it independently.
Refresh the timeline frame onto your busiest shot, not a clean one. Captions that stay readable over the worst background are readable everywhere.
Typography
For social captions: a heavy sans, ALL CAPS, punctuation off, and a stroke of 4–8. Those four choices do most of the work.
Subtitles Box
A background panel behind the whole caption: background and stroke colours, Opacity, Radius, Pad Top / Pad Bot / Padding H, Stroke Width.
Use it when your footage is bright or busy and a text stroke alone isn’t enough.
Shadow
Color, Opacity, Softness (0–20), Distance (0–50), Angle (0–360).
A soft, near-black shadow at low distance separates text from the image far more subtly than a box. Big distances read as a 90s title effect.
Active Word
This is the karaoke effect — the word currently being spoken is highlighted.
Dimming the Left Side and Right Side colours while keeping the active word bright creates the follow-along effect that keeps viewers reading. Keep Active Scale near 110–130% — above that the line reflows visibly on every word.
Active Box
A box drawn behind the active word instead of the whole caption: colours, opacity, radius, vertical and horizontal padding, stroke.
Active Box and Subtitles Box can be combined, but a box behind a box on a stroked font is usually one effect too many. Pick the one that carries the look.
Animations
- Zoom In — the caption pops in.
- Motion Blur — adds blur to the movement.
Emojis
Enable the section, then set Emoji Scale (50–200%) and Pos X / Pos Y. The emojis themselves come from the Auto Emojis button back in the transcription stage — turn the section on here without having generated them and nothing appears.
Place emojis just above the caption rather than beside it: side placement shifts with every caption width, top placement stays visually stable.
Presets
The preset bar at the bottom saves your whole design and reloads it in one click. Build one per channel or per format — it’s the difference between a five-minute setup and a thirty-second one on every video.
Apply to Project
Set an Export Location, then click Apply to Project. The captions are rendered, downloaded to that folder, and placed on your timeline.
The render can take a while and the host app may look frozen near the end while the clips are placed. Let it finish.
Common Pitfalls
- Sequence longer than 30 minutes → refused. Use Subtitles Pro with an SRT instead, or split the sequence.
- Text typo spotted after applying → undo, go Back to the transcription, fix it, and re-apply. It cannot be fixed on the timeline.
- Emojis section on but no emojis visible → run Auto Emojis in the transcription stage first.
- Captions unreadable on light footage → add a stroke first, a shadow second, a box last.
- Caption size looks wrong → it scales with sequence resolution. Re-check on a vertical sequence after designing on a horizontal one.
- Font missing from the list → only fonts installed on your machine appear. Install it, then reopen the panel.
- Flickering captions → raise Max Gap in the transcription stage; tiny gaps between words fragment the captions.
Recommended workflow: transcribe → fix the text completely → Auto Emojis → design on your busiest frame → save a preset → Apply to Project.
