How to Burn Subtitles into a Video on Mac

By NUR Technologies · October 28, 2026 · 4 min read

“Burning in” subtitles means drawing them onto the video itself, so they show everywhere and cannot be turned off. Here is when that is what you want and how to do it on a Mac.

Burned-in or separate?

• Burned-in (open) captions become pixels in the video. They appear in every player and platform and keep your exact style.
• Separate (closed) captions, such as an SRT or VTT file, are shown by the player and can be switched off.

For short vertical videos on TikTok, Reels and Shorts, burned-in is usually the right choice. For long videos where viewers may want to turn captions off, a separate file is friendlier.

Burn subtitles with Offcaps

1. Drop in your videoOpen it in Offcaps. The transcription runs on your Mac.
2. Choose and customize a stylePick a look (clean, highlight, box, pop, karaoke or one word) and set font, colors, outline, box, animation, size and position.
3. Export the MP4Save an MP4 with the captions burned in. Offcaps can also export SRT, VTT and plain text from the same transcript.

Before you export

• Read the whole transcript: once burned in, a typo is part of the picture.
• Keep your original video, since a burned-in file cannot have its captions removed.
• If you may want captions in another language later, export an SRT as well.