How to add auto captions to your video easily (no, really!)

2 weeks ago 5

How do you add auto captions to your video easily? Here’s one way that worked for me in a matter of minutes.

The story

I had an upcoming museum exhibit at La Quinta Museum. The Museum Supervisor asked if I had an interview that she could play on a loop during the exhibit. I mentioned that I could get one. She then asked, “Do you have a version with captions? This would make it accessible to more people.”

That sounded great. I said I would try to figure out how to do that.

The interview video with the captions, auto-created by Capcut. Photo by Kathy Leo Ball.

So many options!

After researching several different options, I found that some people were saying that CapCut would work beautifully. I’ll briefly describe how I did it.

My first attempt with CapCut’s online video editor didn’t work so well. I uploaded the video. However, when I attempted to generate auto captions, I kept getting error messages. However, I decided to give their desktop version a try.

And I am really glad I did.

How I created auto captions using CapCut Desktop

I downloaded CapCut Desktop 4.0.0, which installed quickly and easily. Thankfully, CapCut Desktop is configured somewhat similarly to Davinci Resolve and other video editors, so it was easy to figure out where to import the video.

After importing the video, I swept it into the timeline at the bottom.

Without reading any directions, I figured that I would click on “Captions” at the top. Sure enough, one of the options was “Auto Captions.” I clicked on that. This produced a button at the buttom right of the Captions Window that said “Generate.” And sure enough, that’s what it did.

Good and fast!

Although the video was 46 minutes long, CapCut generated the Auto Captions in about three minutes on my Mac Studio M2 Max.

I should add here that the first time I did this was on a 2017 iMac 27″ mac with Intel chips, and it didn’t take much longer than that. I just did this again so I could grab screenshots for all of you, and that’s very sweet of me.

From importing the video to uploading in five minutes

Bang. Finished. I simply hit the Export Button on the top right. This offered choices. In about five minutes, I was uploading this video to the Museum Supervisor. And CapCut’s Auto Caption function was so simple that I didn’t need to read any directions. Nice.

This reads like an advertisement for CapCut. However, I don’t know them, have never had any contact with them, and have never used any other function in their video editor. I simply figure that if someone like me, who does very little video editing, needs to create automatic captions easily, some of you might benefit from this as well.

How do you add auto captions to your video easily? Here’s one way that worked for me in a matter of minutes.