How to Add SRT Subtitles to Your Videos: A Video Editor's Guide
SRT is the subtitle format every editor ends up needing. It drops straight into Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and CapCut, it is plain text you can fix by hand, and it keeps your captions perfectly timed to the audio. This guide shows you how to get a clean SRT from any YouTube video and import it into the major editors — plus the small mistakes that cause 90% of subtitle headaches.
What an SRT file actually is
SubRip Subtitle (.srt) is a plain-text file made of numbered “cues.” Each cue has an index, a start and end timestamp, and one or two lines of text. That is the whole format:
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,200
Welcome back to the channel.
2
00:00:04,200 --> 00:00:07,500
Today we are setting up subtitles the easy way.Because it is just text, an SRT is universally supported and trivial to edit — you can open it in Notepad or TextEdit, fix a misspelled name, and save. That simplicity is exactly why editors prefer it over locked-in caption tracks.
Step 1: Get a clean SRT in seconds
If the video already lives on YouTube (your own upload, a client's channel, or a reference clip), you do not need to retype anything. Paste the URL into TranscribeYouTube, then use Export for… → Video Editors. You get a properly formatted .srt with timestamps already aligned to the audio — no manual timing required.
Tip: If the video only has YouTube's auto-generated captions, skim the SRT once before importing. Auto-captions are usually 90–95% accurate but tend to miss proper nouns, punctuation, and the occasional homophone.
Step 2: Import into your editor
Adobe Premiere Pro
Open the Text panel (Window → Text), switch to the Captions tab, and choose Import captions from file. Select your .srt, pick the matching frame rate, and Premiere creates a caption track on your timeline. From there you can restyle fonts, reposition, and then burn in the captions on export or keep them as a sidecar/embedded track.
DaVinci Resolve
In the Edit page, right-click the media pool and choose Import → Subtitle, or drag the .srt straight onto your timeline. Resolve adds a dedicated subtitle track you can style in the Inspector. Resolve is the most forgiving of the four with timecode, which makes it a good place to sanity-check an SRT.
Final Cut Pro
Use File → Import → Captions and select the .srt. Final Cut attaches the captions as connected clips. One gotcha: Final Cut wants the caption format and the project to agree, so confirm the role is set to Subtitles (or ITT/CEA-608 as needed) after import.
CapCut
On desktop, go to Captions → Local captions and import the .srt. CapCut is popular for short-form because it makes styling fast — but it can re-time captions if your clip is trimmed, so import subtitles after you lock the edit, not before.
Burned-in vs. soft subtitles
| Burned-in (open) | Soft (closed) | |
|---|---|---|
| Viewer can turn off | No | Yes |
| Best for | TikTok, Reels, Shorts | YouTube, Vimeo, broadcast |
| Editable later | No (re-export) | Yes |
Rule of thumb: burn in for social platforms where most people watch muted, and ship a soft SRT for long-form platforms that have their own caption UI.
The mistakes that cause most subtitle problems
- Frame-rate mismatch. Importing a 23.976 fps SRT into a 30 fps timeline makes captions drift later and later. Match the project frame rate at import.
- Wrong encoding. Save SRT files as UTF-8. Other encodings turn accented characters and em-dashes into garbled symbols.
- Lines too long. Keep cues to roughly 42 characters per line and two lines max, so text never spills off-screen on mobile.
- Overlapping timecodes. One cue's end time should never pass the next cue's start. A clean export avoids this; manual edits sometimes break it.
Need a different format?
Editing for the web instead of a timeline? Export VTT for HTML5 players. Writing show notes or a description? Grab the Clean Text export. You can convert between them any time with our SRT converter and VTT converter.