No upload · No watermark · No minute quotas
YouTube Shorts caption generator
Shorts run up to 3 minutes — exactly CaptionForge's free video cap, so every Short you make is captioned free. Whisper transcribes on your device, karaoke styles animate word-by-word, and safe-area guides keep the text clear of the Shorts UI. Burn in a 1080×1920 MP4, or export SRT for regular YouTube uploads.
- Every Short is free — the 3-minute free cap matches the Shorts limit
- 9:16 safe-area guides for the Shorts overlay UI
- Burned-in styled captions for Shorts; free SRT for long-form YouTube
- No upload, no render queue, no watermark
How it works
- 1 Drop your vertical clip.
- 2 Captions generate locally with word-level timestamps.
- 3 Style them, check the safe-area overlay, fix any words.
- 4 Export 1080×1920 MP4 and upload to YouTube.
Frequently asked questions
Should I burn captions in or upload an SRT to YouTube?
For Shorts: burn them in — the Shorts player shows auto-captions as a plain strip at best, and styled word-by-word captions are part of the format. For regular long-form videos: upload an SRT (free to export here) so viewers can toggle subtitles and YouTube indexes the text. Doing both costs nothing.
Are YouTube's auto-captions not enough for Shorts?
They're functional but unstyled and viewer-toggled — most viewers never turn them on. Burned-in animated captions play for everyone, muted or not, in the visual style your channel uses. That's why nearly all high-performing Shorts carry styled captions.
Is this free for Shorts?
Yes — Shorts max out at 3 minutes, which is exactly the free tier's per-video cap. Unlimited Shorts, 4 presets including karaoke, 1080p/30 export, no watermark. Studio adds the full style library, brand fonts and 4K/60.
Does it handle the Shorts UI overlay?
Yes — the 9:16 safe-area overlay marks where the Shorts title, channel info and action buttons sit, and the default caption position clears them.
My footage is 16:9 — can I still make a captioned Short?
CaptionForge captions the video at its native aspect ratio and shows 16:9 safe areas too. For cropping 16:9 down to 9:16 first, a dedicated resize tool (like our sibling app LocalVid) does that job — then caption the result here.