Quick Captions
Add animated captions to a short video, clean up silences and filler words, and export, without running the full clipping pipeline.
Quick Captions is a lightweight flow for videos that are already the right length. You upload a short clip, OpenClip transcribes it, and you land in an editor where you style captions, cut dead air, and export an MP4. No Viral Moment detection, no clipping, no reframing.
Start a Quick Captions video
Open https://openclip.app/tools/captions, or go to the Tools hub and pick Quick Captions. The page walks you through three steps: Add a video, Caption it, Edit.
Drop a clip on the upload zone. OpenClip prepares the media and generates a transcript, then sends you straight to the editor. Quick Captions videos skip the rest of the pipeline, so processing is much faster than a full clipping run.
The editor
The editor lives at /quick-captions/{video}/edit. It is the same full-screen editor as pipeline clips, on your whole video, and it autosaves as you work.
| Area | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Caption presets | Pick a preset from live tiles in your video's own words |
| Inspector | With the captions selected (they are when the editor opens): turn them on or off, change the preset, the font, where they sit, their size, text colour and case |
| Words | Your transcript: click a word to play from it, select words and cut them, or put cut words back, and download it as text, SRT or JSON |
| AI tools | Remove silences (with an adjustable minimum silence length) and remove filler words, each filler with its own switch |
| Assets and Insert | Add titles, shapes and your own images, video and music over the video |
| Timeline | Trim, split and take out sections, zoom in to the frame, and play at 0.25× to 2× |
Silence and filler removals are cuts like any other: they show on the timeline as you switch them on, and you can switch them off again at any time.
Quick Captions videos have no emoji, bangers or logo, which come from the clipping pipeline and your brand, so the editor leaves those tabs out.
Fonts
Select the captions and press Font in the inspector to open the font picker: the Google Fonts library, nearly 2,000 families, each name shown in its own font, most used first. Search by name or narrow the list to sans serif, serif, display, handwriting or monospace. Pick a family, then one of the weights it offers, and italic where the family has one. The font picker is on every plan.
The fonts are served from OpenClip, so your export and the clips OpenClip renders for you use exactly the files you previewed. A font you chose before the picker keeps looking the same until you pick another.
Exporting
Press Export in the top bar, pick the quality and whether to include sound and captions, and export. The video renders in your browser from your original file, then downloads as an MP4 with your captions burned in and your cuts applied.
On the Free plan, the monthly counter includes Quick Captions Videos that were created during the current calendar month and have an export recorded, including Videos you have since deleted, other than Videos that failed processing. An export is recorded when you download from the editor or when an AI agent starts a captioned render with caption_video. It counts each qualifying Video once, not each download.
| Plan | Export access |
|---|---|
| Free | Available while fewer than 2 qualifying Videos are counted this month |
| Starter | Unlimited |
| Pro | Unlimited |
| Business | Unlimited |
On the Free plan the top bar shows the current count. When it reaches two, the Free plan blocks every further Quick Captions export, including re-exports, and the export button becomes Upgrade to Export. The counter resets at the start of a new calendar month. See credits and plans for what else each plan includes.
From an AI agent
Agents connected over MCP caption a video of up to three minutes with the caption_video tool. The agent uploads the file with create_upload, then calls caption_video with a caption preset. OpenClip transcribes the video and renders the captioned MP4 on its servers, using the same renderer as pipeline clips, so there is no editor step: the agent polls until the rendered MP4 is ready.
caption_video uses the same export allowance as the editor: no credits, two captioned Videos a month on the Free plan, unlimited on paid plans. The export is recorded when the render starts. Captioning the same Video again in a different preset, or retrying a failed render, does not count again, but as in the editor, once the Free plan's two exports are used, no further captioned renders run that month. Re-rendering the Video with render_clip follows the same allowance.
Quick Captions vs the full pipeline
Use Quick Captions when the video is already short and you only need captions and cleanup. Use the full pipeline when you want OpenClip to find the good parts for you.
| You have | Use |
|---|---|
| A short clip that just needs captions, silence trimming, or filler removal | Quick Captions |
| A long Video you want turned into multiple short clips | The clipping pipeline: upload it and review Viral Moments in the Content Hub |
| A clip from the pipeline whose captions you want to restyle | The clip editor, not Quick Captions |
Quick Captions videos do not appear in the Content Hub and do not generate Viral Moments or AI Writer content.
Related
- Uploading videos: sources and upload limits for the full pipeline
- Captions in the clip editor: caption styling for pipeline clips
- Tools overview: the other lightweight tools next to Quick Captions