Glossary
Burned-in captions
Burned-in captions are subtitles encoded into the pixels of the video, as opposed to a separate caption track the player optionally renders. On short-form platforms where most viewing happens with sound off, burned-in captions are non-optional — they're how a clip retains viewers past the first three seconds.
Part of the AI Video Clipping topic cluster.
Why burned-in beats soft-coded captions
Soft-coded captions (SRT files attached to a video) rely on the player to display them. On Reels, Shorts, and TikTok, the player doesn't always honor SRT files, and most viewers haven't enabled captions in their settings even when the player would.
Burned-in captions display universally because they're part of the image. The trade-off is they can't be turned off, which is fine for short-form content where captions are expected.
What good burned-in captions look like
- Word-level timing — captions advance one word at a time, not one full sentence.
- Readable on a 5-inch mobile screen at arm's length — usually 36pt+ font.
- High-contrast text (white on black stroke, or theme color on dark stroke).
- Lower-third placement that doesn't cover the speaker's mouth.
- Brand-consistent typography across every clip in a series.
How Clipperz applies caption styling
Captions are generated from the transcript and styled per the brand template. A single template controls font, color, background, and animation pattern across every clip in the workspace, so a hundred clips for a single show share the same caption look without per-clip configuration.
See how Clipperz handles this in product: See AI captions →
Related terms
See it in action
Paste a video URL into Clipperz and watch the concept play out on your own content.
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