Captions

Captions make a demo watchable with the sound off and easier to follow with it on. Playback generates them from your narration — you don’t type them out.

Generating captions

Press Transcribe in the editor. Playback transcribes your recording’s audio and adds captions to the timeline, with the words appearing as they’re spoken — a karaoke-style reveal that stays in sync with your voice.

The first time you transcribe, Playback downloads its speech models; you’ll see a Fetching models… then Transcribing… progress readout. After that, transcription runs on-device. You can check or manage the download from the Speech models… panel in the ⋯ overflow menu, which shows whether models are Downloaded and Ready for offline transcription.

Showing and hiding

Toggle Show captions / Hide captions to preview your video with or without them. Captions render as clean text plates over the frame.

Editing a caption

Select a caption on the timeline to edit it in the inspector. You can:

• Fix the wording — correct any transcription slip by editing the caption text directly.
• Retime it — drag the caption pill on the timeline to change when it appears and how long it stays.
• Remove it — choose Remove Caption to delete one you don’t want.

Tips

• Transcribe near the end. Do your cutting and speed edits first; captions ripple to follow the footage, but it’s less to review if the take is close to final.
• Read them back. Automatic transcription is good, not perfect — skim the captions and fix names, jargon, or product terms it didn’t know.