Captions & Subtitles

What is Burned-In Captions?

Burned-in captions (also called hardcoded or open captions) are text overlays permanently embedded into the video pixels, visible to all viewers without toggles.

Burned-In Captions Explained

Unlike closed captions (which can be toggled on/off), burned-in captions are part of the video itself. They cannot be turned off, resized, or repositioned by the viewer. This format is standard for social media videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts because these platforms either lack native caption support or display them inconsistently. Burned-in captions ensure consistent styling, positioning, and animation across all devices. The trade-off is that they cannot be translated or modified after export. BlitzReels always produces burned-in captions with customizable styles, animations, and positioning that are rendered directly into the exported video file.

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BlitzReels provides the tools and automation to put these concepts into practice.

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Related Terms

Caption Styles

Caption styles are visual design presets that control how text captions appear on screen, including font, color, size, position, background, and animation effects.

SRT Subtitles

SRT (SubRip Text) is a plain-text subtitle file format that stores timed text with sequence numbers, timestamps, and subtitle content for displaying text over video.

Auto Caption

Auto captioning is the process of automatically generating text captions from spoken audio in a video using AI speech recognition, without manual transcription.

Export Preset

An export preset is a saved configuration of video output settings including codec, resolution, bitrate, aspect ratio, and format, allowing creators to apply consistent export parameters across multiple projects.