Notes · Note 10
Captions that don’t look AI-made
Auto-captions have a house style, and everyone has learned to spot it. Five overrides fix that.
The short version
- The default font and the word-by-word bounce are the giveaways.
- Cap line length, add a background, and lift the text off the bottom edge.
- Five minutes once, saved as a template, applies to everything after.
Auto-captions are one of the easiest wins in short video, and out of the box they announce which tool made them. Viewers cannot always name why something looks cheap, but they register it. These five changes take five minutes once.
1. Change the font
The defaults ship on millions of videos. Anything else — ideally the typeface your brand already uses — reads as deliberate rather than automatic.
2. Cap line length around 28 characters
Long caption lines make the eye travel and push text into the edges of the frame. Shorter lines sit better on a phone and read faster.
3. Kill the bounce
The word-by-word pop animation is the single strongest tell. Turn it off. Plain text that simply appears looks more expensive than anything animated.
4. Put a background behind the text
A soft background around seventy percent opacity, with a little padding, keeps words legible over any footage. Without it, captions vanish over light backgrounds and every video has a moment nobody can read.
5. Lift them off the bottom
Default placement sits near the bottom edge, exactly where the platform puts its own interface. Move captions up to roughly a quarter of the frame height so nothing covers your words.
Save it as a template or preset the first time. The five minutes is a one-off; every video after inherits it.
None of this makes a weak video good. It removes the one signal telling viewers that nobody bothered.