Creating Short-Form Captions with Crate
A quick breakdown of how this tool formats subtitles and how to import them into your video editor.
Why Micro-Phrased Subtitles Work Better
When viewers watch short-form videos on mobile without sound or in noisy environments, large blocks of paragraph subtitles clutter the frame and distract from the visuals. Crate takes the full transcript and slices it into short, readable segments of 2 to 4 words. Each cut is placed naturally around grammatical boundaries—like before prepositions and conjunctions—so sentences feel conversational rather than mechanical.
How Your Audio is Processed Locally
Unlike web apps that upload multi-gigabyte video files to an external cloud queue, Crate decodes the audio track on your own machine using your browser's Web Audio API. The speech recognition model runs via WebAssembly inside a background worker. Your original video footage never leaves your computer, which keeps processing fast and keeps unreleased footage private.
Importing Your .SRT into CapCut or Premiere Pro
- Upload your video or audio file above and wait for speech decoding to finish.
- Click Download .SRT once the captions appear in the preview box.
- In CapCut: Open your project, click Text > Auto Captions or Local Subtitles, and select your downloaded file.
- In Adobe Premiere: Drag the .SRT file into your project panel, then drop it directly onto the timeline above your video track.
- Pick your favorite font, animation preset, or text stroke to finish your edit.
Tips for the Best Transcription Accuracy
For best results, make sure the spoken voice is clearly audible above background music or sound effects. If your clip has heavy background tracks, transcribing the raw voiceover track first before mixing usually yields the cleanest timings.
Speaking at a steady, natural pace also helps. The speech engine is trained on conversational audio, so it handles everyday speech well. Heavy accents, extremely fast delivery, or overlapping voices can reduce accuracy. If you notice mistakes, try uploading just the voice-over track without music, then layer it back in your editor after importing the subtitle file.
Supported File Formats
Crate accepts any video or audio format your browser can decode, which covers the vast majority of common formats: MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, AVI, MP3, WAV, M4A, and OGG. File size support goes up to around 1 GB depending on your device's available memory.
If your file is very large, you can save time by trimming it to just the speaking portions before uploading. There is no server-side limit because no file is ever uploaded — everything runs locally in your tab. The output is always a standard .SRT subtitle file, which is universally supported across every major video editing app.
How Emojis Are Added to Captions
After the speech is transcribed and split into short phrases, each caption chunk is sent as plain text to a lightweight formatting endpoint. That function evaluates semantic context to pair each phrase with a single relevant emoji based on meaning and tone. The original video file is never touched by this step — only the plain text of the captions is processed.
Emojis are appended at the end of each subtitle line, so they show up naturally in CapCut, Premiere, and DaVinci as part of the caption text. If you prefer captions without emojis, you can remove them from the .SRT file in any plain text editor before importing, or simply find and delete emoji characters after import inside your video editor.
Which Video Editors Work with .SRT Files
The .SRT format is one of the most widely supported subtitle formats in the world. Here is a quick reference for the editors most commonly used by short-form creators:
- CapCut — Go to Text → Local Subtitles and select your .SRT file. Styles apply automatically.
- Adobe Premiere Pro — Drag the .SRT into the project panel, then drag it onto the timeline above your video.
- DaVinci Resolve — In the Edit page, right-click the timeline and choose Import Subtitle Track.
- Final Cut Pro — Use the Captions menu to import a CEA-608 caption file. Convert .SRT to that format first using a free tool like SubtitleEdit.
- iMovie — iMovie does not natively support .SRT. Burn the captions into the video first using HandBrake or a similar tool.
Privacy and Data Handling
Your video or audio is processed entirely on your own device. The audio signal is decoded in your browser using the Web Audio API and fed directly into a speech recognition model that runs locally — nothing is sent to a server or stored anywhere. The only external call made during the entire process is a small text-only request to add emojis to the caption lines. Your footage, your voice, and your content stay private.