Editing & Post-Production

Open captions

Also called: burned-in captions, hardsubs, baked-in subtitles

Because they are pixels instead of a text track, they survive being downloaded, reposted or watched in an app that ignores subtitle files, and that is what made them standard on short-form. You control the font, position and animation exactly.

The costs are real. Nobody can turn them off, translating means re-rendering the video, and neither YouTube nor a search engine can read them, so the words never reach the transcript. The usual compromise on long-form is open captions where they add something plus a proper caption file underneath for accessibility and search.

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