How to Add Captions in After Effects: A Step-by-Step Guide

Adding subtitles to your videos in After Effects is a great way to enhance your content and make it more accessible. Whether you’re creating educational videos, promotional clips, or entertainment content, adding subtitles can help ensure that your message reaches more people. Plus, creating custom subtitles in After Effects gives you complete control over their appearance, making it possible to create subtitles that suit your video’s unique aesthetic.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to add captions in After Effects, explaining each step in detail while being honest about the limitations of this method. But don’t worry, we’ll also explore alternatives to make the process more efficient, since After Effects doesn’t provide a fully integrated way to automate the captioning process.

Table of Contents

• Step-by-Step Guide to Add Captions in After Effects
  • Step 1: Import Your Video into After Effects
  • Step 2: Create Text Layers for Captions
  • Step 3: Synchronize Your Captions with Audio
  • Step 4: Customize Your Captions
  • Step 5: Organize Your Captions Using Pre-compose
• Exporting Captions with After Effects
• Importing SRT Files into After Effects
• Using ZapCap for Captioning
  • How ZapCap Makes Captioning Easier
    • What if you want to work with subtitles in After Effects without exporting your video?
    • How Can I Add Subtitles to a Video on My iPhone?
• The Bottom Line
  • FAQ

Step-by-Step Guide to Add Captions in After Effects

The process of adding captions in After Effects is highly manual. Unlike some modern editing tools, After Effects doesn’t have a built-in feature for automatically generating captions.

Step 1: Import Your Video into After Effects

First, you need to import the video that you want to add captions to.

1. Open After Effects and create a new project.
2. Import your video by selecting File > Import > File or dragging it directly into the project panel.
3. Create a new composition by dragging your imported video into the timeline panel.

Step 2: Create Text Layers for Captions

In After Effects, captions are created using text layers. This means that adding captions requires creating multiple text layers for each line of dialogue.

1. Select the Text Tool (T) from the toolbar, or press “T” on your keyboard.
2. Click anywhere on the composition to create a text box, and type in the dialogue or caption.
3. For each line of dialogue, you’ll need to create a separate text layer. This can quickly become tedious for videos with a lot of dialogue but gives you precise control over each caption.

Step 3: Synchronize Your Captions with Audio

After typing out your captions, you need to synchronize them with your video. This part of the process is also manual, as After Effects lacks an automatic sync feature.

1. Drag each text layer in the timeline panel to match the start and end points of the corresponding audio.
2. Use the waveform view of the audio track to help with syncing. The peaks and valleys in the waveform give a visual reference for when dialogue starts and stops.

This step can be time-consuming, especially for long videos. Accurate synchronization is critical for ensuring your captions are effective, but it takes considerable effort without automation.

Step 4: Customize Your Captions

The benefit of using After Effects is the ability to fully customize your captions.

1. Use the Character Panel to adjust the font style, size, and color of the captions to match your branding.
2. If your video has a busy background, add a stroke or shadow to the text to make it more readable.
3. To add some creativity, you can animate your captions by using the Effects & Presets panel for a fade-in or slide-in effect.

Step 5: Organize Your Captions Using Pre-compose

As you add multiple captions, your timeline can get cluttered. To keep things organized, use Pre-compose:

1. Select all text layers for your captions.
2. Right-click and choose Pre-compose to group them into a single composition, making it easier to apply changes across multiple captions.

Exporting Captions with After Effects

Once your captions are added, you can export your final video. However, After Effects can only export open captions—meaning that captions are embedded directly into the video, and viewers cannot toggle them on or off.

1. Go to File > Export > Add to Render Queue.
2. Set your preferred export settings and click Render to export the final video with captions embedded.

Importing SRT Files into After Effects

One significant limitation of After Effects is that it doesn’t natively support SRT or VTT file imports. However, there are third-party plugins that enable this functionality. Using an SRT importer script can significantly ease the burden of manually adding each caption.

• After Effects SRT Importer Script: This free script, such as the After Effects SRT Importer by Digital Anarchy, allows users to import SRT files and create text layers automatically. This way, you don’t need to manually type each line of dialogue. The script reads the SRT file and generates text layers accordingly, which can then be customized like any other text layer in After Effects.

While these plugins make the process easier, they are not built into After Effects itself. This means you need to set up and use additional tools to benefit from automated captions in After Effects.

Using ZapCap for Captioning

If the manual work involved in adding captions in After Effects feels overwhelming, ZapCap is a practical alternative.

How ZapCap Makes Captioning Easier

Automatic Transcription: Instead of spending hours manually creating captions, simply export your video from After Effects and upload it to zapcap.ai. ZapCap will automatically transcribe your video’s audio quickly and accurately. It supports transcription in over 50 languages, including English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and many others.

This makes it ideal for content creators looking to reach a global audience, ensuring that your message is understood across language barriers without the hassle of manual transcription.

Customization with Preset Templates: ZapCap also offers a variety of preset templates for styling your captions, which can be fully customized.

You can adjust the font, color, and size to suit your branding, and even add animations to make your captions more engaging.

These templates make it easy to create professional-looking subtitles without needing advanced design skills, saving time and ensuring a consistent look across all your content.

What if you want to work with subtitles in After Effects without exporting your video?

While After Effects doesn’t allow you to directly import SRT or VTT files natively, you can still use tools like the After Effects SRT Importer in combination with ZapCap.

With ZapCap’s new transcribe and translate tools, you can generate the transcription and export it as an SRT file. Then, using a plugin, you can easily import these captions into After Effects, turning what would have been a long, manual process into a much more streamlined workflow. This approach ensures you can still use After Effects for its advanced customization features while significantly cutting down on the manual labor involved in transcription and syncing.

How Can I Add Subtitles to a Video on My iPhone?

If you’re looking for an easier way to add subtitles without using a desktop program like After Effects, you can do it directly on your iPhone. With apps like iMovie, you can quickly add subtitles to your videos, making it perfect for quick edits and social media content.

To learn more about adding subtitles directly on your iPhone, check out our full guide here: How to Add Subtitles to a Video on iPhone.

The Bottom Line

Adding captions in After Effects gives you full creative control over how your captions look, but it’s a very manual process that involves typing and syncing each line by hand. After Effects does not natively support importing SRT or VTT files, and there is no built-in transcription feature, making this process time-consuming.

With the right approach, you can make your video content more accessible without spending hours creating captions from scratch. ZapCap and third-party tools for After Effects offer an efficient solution that bridges the gap between creativity and practicality.

FAQ

Can After Effects generate subtitles automatically?

No, After Effects does not have a built-in feature for automatic subtitle generation. Adding subtitles in After Effects is a manual process, requiring you to create and sync each text layer individually.

How can I import SRT files into After Effects?

After Effects does not natively support SRT file imports. However, you can use third-party plugins like the After Effects SRT Importer to bring in SRT files, making it easier to generate subtitles using pre-made caption files.

What is the benefit of using ZapCap with After Effects?

ZapCap simplifies the captioning process by automatically transcribing your video into over 50 languages. Just export your video and upload it to ZapCap—it will auto-generate captions that you can animate and fully customize to match your style.

Are the captions added in After Effects open or closed?

Captions added in After Effects are open captions, meaning they are embedded directly into the video and cannot be turned on or off by viewers. For closed captioning, you would need to create an SRT or VTT file using a tool like ZapCap and upload it to video platforms that support closed captions.