Closed captions
Captions kept apart from the picture: the platform draws them over the video and viewers can turn them off. Burned-in captions are called open captions.
TikTok, Instagram and YouTube all write closed captions from a video's speech by themselves, and let the creator edit them: TikTok after posting, Instagram with a switch before a reel is shared, YouTube in YouTube Studio. Because a machine makes them, they can be wrong on names, slang and dialect.
Open, or burned-in, captions are part of the video file: everyone sees them, sound on or off, and they look the same on every platform. Many short videos use them because they can be styled, each word lighting up as it is spoken. Use one kind per video, or the same words appear twice.
How to add captions to TikTok, Reels and Shorts
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