|
Think briefly about the power of captions. A video with well-placed captions in an easy-to-read font can be more engaging, easy to reference, and more accessible for viewers.
But the last thing you want is for captions to be distracting. This is why we recommend asking for a colleague, ideally a digital or audience editor, to edit your captions for grammar and spelling mistakes — and to check for style improvements.
“I always think it's really important to have another person look at your stuff, no matter how many years you've been doing it,” says Abigail Monsour, a digital editor at Bloomberg Industry Group who deploys Canva in her work. “I always have my editor check things.”
Canva makes it efficient to add captions to your video from scratch or — for Pro users — to autogenerate them.
Here’s how to add captions from scratch:
-
When editing a video, click “Notes” under the timeline editor and paste your video transcript.
-
Break up the video into scenes by pausing the video, right-clicking, and selecting “split” (or, press the S key while the video plays).
-
Copy and paste the text you want to appear in the first scene, customizing the color, font, and size of the text.
-
You can toggle effects to make the text more readable.
-
Animate the text box to choose how you want the text to move within the frame.
- Repeat these steps for each page to add new subtitles.
Autogenerated captions (pro feature):
- Open a video project you’re working on.
-
Hover over the “Apps” menu on the lefthand side.
-
Under “More from Canva” select “Captions.”
- Select which scenes you want captioned.
-
Click “Generate captions.”
To customize the font and add effects like a background color to make the captions more readable, click on the text and toggle the menu items that appear at the top of the screen.
Here’s what that looks like for a video we edited:
| 
