How to Add Subtitles in DaVinci Resolve (Full Guide)
DaVinci Resolve can generate subtitles from your audio automatically, but the feature is buried in a right-click menu, the free and Studio versions do not behave the same way, and the styling controls live somewhere other than where most people look first. If you have ever ended up typing captions manually into a subtitle track, you did more work than you needed to. This guide walks the whole path: generate, edit, style, and export either burned-in captions or a clean SRT file.
Everything below assumes DaVinci Resolve 18.5 or newer, since that is the version where automatic subtitle generation arrived.
Step 1: Check which version of Resolve you have
Open Resolve and go to the DaVinci Resolve menu (macOS) or Help menu (Windows) and choose About DaVinci Resolve. You need two pieces of information: the version number and whether it says Studio.
Automatic subtitle generation from audio is a Studio feature. The free version can still import, edit, style, burn in, and export subtitles perfectly well, it just will not transcribe the audio for you. Language support for automatic transcription is also narrower than what you get from a dedicated transcription tool, and it varies by release, so check the dropdown in Step 3 rather than assuming your language is there.
If you are on the free version, skip to Step 6, where you import an SRT instead of generating one. Everything from Step 7 onward is identical for both versions.
Step 2: Set up your timeline audio
Automatic transcription reads the audio on your timeline, so get the audio right before you generate anything. Two things matter.
First, make sure the audio you want transcribed is actually audible in the timeline mix. Muted tracks and tracks set to solo will skew what Resolve hears. Second, if you have music or heavy sound design on separate tracks, temporarily mute them. Background music is the single biggest cause of garbled auto-transcription, and it is far cheaper to mute a track for thirty seconds than to fix a hundred bad captions afterward.
If your dialogue is clean and centered, you are ready.
Step 3: Generate subtitles from audio
Go to the Edit page. In the Timeline menu at the top, choose Create Subtitles from Audio.
A dialog appears with several options worth understanding:
Language. Pick the spoken language of your footage. This is not a translation setting, it is telling the transcription engine what to listen for. Choosing the wrong one produces nonsense.
Caption preset. Subtitle Default is the standard choice. Some presets are tuned for broadcast-style caption formatting with different line counts.
Maximum characters per line. Around 42 characters is a common broadcast convention and works well for horizontal video. For vertical or short-form video, drop this lower so lines do not wrap awkwardly on a narrow frame.
Lines per caption. One or two. Two is standard for most content.
Split on gaps of. This controls how long a pause has to be before Resolve starts a new caption. Shortening it produces more, shorter captions.
Click Create. Resolve processes the timeline audio and builds a new subtitle track above your video tracks, populated with timed caption clips.
There is a second, related command in the same menu: Transcribe Audio, which you access by right-clicking an audio clip in the media pool or timeline. That produces a text transcript in the Text Based Editing panel rather than a subtitle track. It is useful for text-based editing workflows but it is not the command you want if your goal is on-screen subtitles.
Step 4: Read and correct the generated text
This is the step people skip, and it is the step that determines whether your subtitles look professional.
Click any caption clip on the subtitle track and its text appears in the Inspector on the right, under the Captions tab. You can type directly into it. Move between captions with the arrow keys or by clicking along the track.
Watch specifically for:
- Proper nouns, brand names, and product names, which almost always come back wrong
- Numbers and units, especially when spoken quickly
- Homophone errors that read fine in isolation but are wrong in context
- Missing punctuation at the ends of sentences
You can also drag the edges of a caption clip on the timeline to retime when it appears and disappears, exactly like trimming a video clip. If a caption flashes past too quickly to read, extend it. Roughly one second of screen time per short line is a reasonable floor.
If the transcript comes back rough enough that correcting it feels like retyping it, that is your signal to stop and get a better transcript rather than fight it. This is the point where running the video through Tapescribe and importing the resulting SRT is faster than editing in place, since it gives you an accurate transcript with correct punctuation and speaker-aware breaks that you drop straight into the timeline. Step 6 covers the import.
Step 5: Style the subtitles in the Inspector
Select a caption clip, open the Inspector, and go to the Captions tab. Here is the part that trips people up: styling is not applied per clip by default. Look for the track-level style controls so your changes propagate to every caption rather than just the one you selected. If you style one clip at a time, you will be doing it a hundred times.
The controls you actually care about:
Font family, size, and color. Pick something with a heavy weight. Thin fonts disappear against busy footage.
Background. A semi-transparent black box behind the text is the most reliable way to stay readable over any footage. Adjust the background opacity and the padding around the text.
Stroke and drop shadow. If a background box feels too heavy for your look, a thin dark stroke around white text does most of the same job.
Position. Set the vertical offset so captions sit above your lower thirds, logos, or platform UI. For vertical video destined for TikTok or Reels, push captions toward the middle of the frame so the platform's own interface does not cover them.
Preview with a busy section of footage, not a clean one. Subtitles that look great over a static interview shot can become unreadable over a bright outdoor scene.
Step 6: Import an existing SRT file instead
If you are on the free version, or you generated a transcript elsewhere, importing is straightforward.
Right-click in the Media Pool and choose Import Subtitle, or use File then Import then Subtitle. Select your SRT or VTT file. It appears in the Media Pool as a subtitle item.
Drag it onto the timeline. Resolve creates a subtitle track and places every caption at the timecode written in the file.
One thing to verify: the SRT timestamps are relative to the start of the source video, while your timeline may start at hour one or have the clip positioned somewhere other than the very beginning. If the captions land offset from the dialogue, select the whole subtitle track and slide it until the first caption lines up with the first word spoken. Once the first one matches, the rest will follow.
After import, the styling from Step 5 applies exactly the same way.
Step 7: Decide between burned-in and separate subtitles
These are two genuinely different outputs and the choice matters.
Burned-in (open captions) means the text is rendered permanently into the video pixels. Viewers cannot turn them off. This is what you want for social platforms where autoplay is muted and where sidecar subtitle files are not reliably supported.
Separate subtitle file (closed captions) means you deliver a video plus an SRT file, or a container format with an embedded subtitle stream. Viewers can toggle them, search engines can read them, and you can swap in another language later without re-rendering. This is what you want for YouTube, Vimeo, a course platform, or a client handoff.
Many creators deliver both: a burned-in version for social, a clean version plus SRT for the primary platform.
Step 8: Export on the Deliver page
Go to the Deliver page and set up your render as normal, then handle subtitles in the Subtitle Settings section of the render settings panel.
To burn subtitles in: enable Export Subtitle, then choose Burn into Video. The captions are baked into the rendered file using the styling from Step 5.
To export a separate file: enable Export Subtitle and choose As a Separate File, with SRT as the format. Resolve writes the .srt alongside your video file in the render location. Keep the same base filename so players that auto-detect sidecar files can find it.
To embed as a soft subtitle stream: choose As Embedded Captions, available with container formats that support it. The subtitles ride inside the file but stay toggleable.
Add the job to the render queue and render. Check the output folder for both files before you consider the job done.
Common problems and how to fix them
Create Subtitles from Audio is greyed out. You are either on the free version, or your timeline has no audio that Resolve can read. Confirm the version first, then confirm the audio track is not muted.
Transcription output is garbled. Almost always background music or overlapping speech. Mute non-dialogue tracks and regenerate. If the source audio itself is noisy, no automatic tool will save it in-app, and a dedicated transcription pass usually handles messy audio better than the in-editor engine.
Styling only changed one caption. You edited clip-level properties instead of track-level. Undo, then find the track style controls in the Captions tab and apply there.
Imported SRT is out of sync. Timestamp origin mismatch. Slide the entire subtitle track so the first caption matches the first spoken word.
Captions render but do not appear in the exported file. Export Subtitle was left off in the Deliver page settings, or you chose As a Separate File when you expected them visible on screen. Re-check that the Burn into Video option is selected.
Text gets cut off at the frame edge. Your maximum characters per line is too high for the frame, or the safe-area margin is too tight. Regenerate with a lower character limit, or reduce the font size.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the free version of DaVinci Resolve support subtitles?
Yes, with one limitation. The free version fully supports importing, editing, styling, burning in, and exporting subtitles. It does not generate them automatically from audio, which is a Studio feature. Free users bring in an SRT from elsewhere and work with it normally.
Can I export subtitles from Resolve as a separate SRT file?
Yes. On the Deliver page, open Subtitle Settings, enable Export Subtitle, and choose the option to write it as a separate file in SRT format. The file lands in the same folder as your rendered video.
Why are my auto-generated subtitles so inaccurate?
The usual causes are background music mixed with dialogue, multiple speakers talking over each other, strong accents, or heavy technical vocabulary. Muting music tracks before generating helps significantly. When the audio itself is the constraint, transcribing outside Resolve with a tool like Tapescribe and importing the SRT gives you a cleaner starting point than correcting caption by caption.
Should I export SRT or VTT from Resolve?
Use SRT when you are handing the file to a video platform or an editor, since it is the most widely accepted format. Use VTT when the captions are for web playback, because it supports positioning and styling that SRT does not. Our guide to SRT vs VTT subtitle formats breaks down which one each platform expects, and if you need a file before you ever open Resolve you can create an SRT from a video automatically.
Subtitles are one of those tasks where the setup takes longer than the doing. Get your audio clean, generate or import once, style at the track level rather than clip by clip, and decide early whether you need pixels or a sidecar file, because that decision changes what you set on the Deliver page. Once you have a caption style you like, save it as a preset and the next project is a five minute job.