DaVinci Resolve Subtitles: Create, Style, Import & Export

Quick answer: Put your captions on a subtitle track when you want them readable, editable, restylable and exportable. If the text is already timed, import the SRT. If it isn't, add cues by hand or let Create Subtitles from Audio in Resolve Studio write a first draft.

Lock the edit before final timing, then decide on the Deliver page whether viewers get a separate subtitle file, embedded captions or text burned permanently into the picture.

Adding subtitles takes a minute. Finishing them badly is just as quick. A track that looks clean on the Edit page can still export an hour out of sync, lose its styling in an SRT file or vanish because the wrong subtitle track was enabled.

The fix is to split captions into four separate jobs: text, timing, presentation and delivery.

This guide follows the subtitle-track workflow in DaVinci Resolve 21. Chapter 59 of the September 2026 Resolve 21 Reference Manual still documents the import, speech-to-text, timing, styling and delivery labels used below, while the current Edit page confirms the broader subtitle-track workflow.

The boundary that matters most runs between ordinary captions, Studio speech-to-text and Text+ graphics. Pick the wrong one at the start and you'll spend the rest of the job working around it.

Choose the Right Caption Workflow First

Resolve gives you three caption tools that look related but do different jobs. Work backward from the output:

For long-form work I'd start with the subtitle track every time, because it keeps hundreds of cues manageable. Track style changes the shared font, size, position, color, outline and background without rebuilding a single line.

You can have several subtitle tracks for different languages or uses, but only one is visible at a time. Name each track before delivery, since Resolve uses subtitle track names when it exports and encodes. If two people talk over each other, Add Subtitle Region lets one track show up to three captions at once.

Don't build a 20-minute caption job out of separate Text+ clips just because a social tutorial animates every word. Reach for graphics only when the animation is part of the creative brief. Our Text and Text+ guide covers that separate workflow.

Add a Subtitle Track and Create Captions Manually

1. Open the finished timeline on the Edit page.
2. Right-click in the track-header area on the left of the timeline and choose Add Subtitle Track.
3. Park the playhead on the first spoken line.
4. Right-click the subtitle track and choose Add Subtitle, or click Create Caption in the Captions panel of the Inspector.
5. With the cue selected, open Inspector > Caption and type or correct the text.
6. Drag the cue's left and right edges until it appears and clears with the spoken phrase.

The Cut page has the same subtitle tools as the Edit page, Create Subtitles from Audio included. There, click the Timeline Actions icon and choose Add Subtitle Track. When the track crowds your video and audio, the Timeline Options icon has Minimize Subtitle Track.

Each caption is a short reading unit, not a mechanical copy of the punctuation. Break a line at a natural phrase boundary, never between an article and its noun or between someone's first and last name. Two balanced lines are usually easier to scan than one line stretched across the frame.

Lock picture before the detailed timing pass. Trim dialogue after the captions are done and downstream cues may no longer match the speech. Clip > Linked Clips ties subtitles to their clip so they travel with it when you rearrange scenes, though the manual itself says trimming doesn't always behave the way you'd expect. After any late edit, check every caption past the cut.

Nested timelines need one more step. Drag a subtitled timeline from the Media Pool or Source Viewer into a new timeline and its subtitles come with it, but they only join the new timeline's caption list once you Decompose in Place the nested timeline. I'd decompose before the caption pass, because a line that isn't in that list is easy to skip when you proof from it.

Show Overlapping Dialogue with Subtitle Regions

When two people talk over each other, a single row of cues makes one line wait for the other. Right-click inside the subtitle track itself, not its header, and choose Add Subtitle Region. A track holds three regions at most, R1 to R3, and the same menu deletes or renames one.

Each region keeps its own Captions list and Style settings, text position included, and you move a cue to another region by dragging it up or down inside the track. I'd lay the regions out by where people stand, R2 for the speaker on the left and R3 for the one on the right, because the caption's position then shows who's talking without a name tag.

Import an SRT Without Losing the Timing

Resolve 21 imports subtitle files in SRT, SRTX, VTT, XML and TTML formats. SRT is the usual interchange choice: numbered cues, start and end timestamps and plain text. It doesn't carry your Resolve font, outline, screen position or animation.

I like that separation. Timing and language can move between platforms while the look stays under your control in the project or the player.

1. Open the Media Pool, right-click a bin or its background, choose Import Subtitle and pick the subtitle file.
2. Add a subtitle track if the timeline doesn't have one, or drag the file into the empty gray area above the video tracks and let Resolve create the track for you.
3. For manual placement, drag the file onto a subtitle track. Resolve places the cues relative to the first subtitle and the point where you drop the file, so the spacing between cues survives.
4. If the subtitle file was written against the same program timecode, right-click it and choose Insert Selected Subtitles to Timeline Using Timecode.
5. Play the first, middle and last cues before you style anything, then rename the track for its language or use.

The classic failure is a zero-based SRT whose first cue starts near 00:00:01,000 and a timeline that starts at 01:00:00:00. Place it by absolute timecode and the two sit in different ranges. Either align the timeline start with the SRT timestamps, or place the file relative to the playhead when that suits your workflow.

If accented or non-Latin characters arrive as boxes or gibberish, save the subtitle file as UTF-8 and try a font that contains those glyphs.

If the cues drift further and further, not a fixed distance early or late, look at the source timing and ask whether the video was retimed or re-edited after the subtitle file was made.

Both ways of placing the file are spelled out in the import section of the Resolve 21.1 manual, and the diagram below shows where the same zero-based SRT ends up with each one.

Generate Captions from Audio in Studio

Resolve Studio can turn timeline speech into a first-pass subtitle track. Build and clean the dialogue first, set an In and Out range if you only need part of the timeline, then choose Timeline > AI Tools > Create Subtitles from Audio.

Pick the language, caption preset, maximum characters per line, one or two lines, and the gap between cues. Let Resolve generate the track, then correct it against the actual audio.

Auto in the Language menu lets Resolve detect the spoken language. The built-in language list covers Chinese (Simplified Mandarin), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. More than 40 others, including Arabic, Hindi, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese, come with the Extended AI Transcription Support Package, which you get from DaVinci Resolve > Extras Download Manager. The download runs in the background, so you can keep editing while it installs.

Two details in the Resolve 21.1 manual's Create Subtitles from Audio section save a lot of head-scratching: if the timeline has no subtitle track, Resolve Studio makes one, and if it has several, the new captions always go to the highest track.

Speech-to-text is a Studio feature. The free edition still creates manual subtitles, imports an SRT, styles the track and delivers captions. If the automatic command is missing, check which edition you've installed before you start troubleshooting menus or reinstalling.

Automatic captions aren't a finished transcript. Resolve adds punctuation and capitalizes names it recognizes, but you still need to check names, numbers, homophones, acronyms and speaker changes.

Blackmagic specifically warns that overlapping dialogue on multiple audio tracks can trip up the analysis, so mute any track you don't want analyzed before generating captions. If transcription itself is the main job, the full Resolve 21 transcription workflow covers it properly and I won't duplicate that process here.

Time and Style the Subtitle Track

Select a cue and use the Caption controls for its words and cue-level settings. Select the track and use Inspector > Track when you want the same look on every cue. Turn on Customize Caption only for a deliberate exception on one cue or one word.

My rule is simple: global consistency belongs at track level, a specific exception belongs on the cue. Once a track looks right, Save Track as Preset in the Subtitle Inspector's options menu lets you reuse that style on the next language or project.

A style someone else built travels as a .preset file. In the Subtitle Inspector, open the three-dot options menu in the upper right, choose Import Preset and open the file; the preset then appears in that options menu.

Start with these checks:

• Position: keep captions inside a safe area and clear of player controls, lower thirds and burned-in platform UI.
• Contrast: a restrained outline, shadow or background stops bright footage from swallowing white text.
• Line breaks: protect the meaning and don't strand one short word on the second line.
• Duration: give viewers time to read without leaving an old caption over the next thought.
• Case: sentence case reads faster than long blocks of all caps.

Set measurable warnings before the QC pass. In Project Settings > Subtitles, Resolve can flag Characters Per Line, Minimum Caption Duration and Maximum Characters Per Second, and the CPS value turns red when a cue goes over the current threshold.

When a language track needs different limits, select that track, open Inspector > Track > Subtitle Settings, uncheck Use Project Settings, then set Max Line Length, Min Duration and Max CPS for that track alone.

Resolve 21 adds a few finishing tools, all documented in Blackmagic's New Features Guide.

The subtitle Inspector can find and replace a name across the whole track. Manually entered or imported captions can run Update Word Timings, and a track-header command called Synchronize Word Timings retimes the whole track.

If a clip already has a transcript, right-click it in the Media Pool and choose AI Tools > Audio Transcription > Import and Detect Timing to bring the transcription in and let Resolve analyze its timing. That menu belongs to the Audio Transcription tools, which the manual marks Studio only.

Subtitle clips also get fade handles. AI Animated Subtitles templates are a Studio feature, but ordinary subtitle timing, styling and delivery don't need them.

Animated templates such as Word Highlight sit in the Animated section of the Titles tab. Drag one onto the subtitle track header and adjust it in the Inspector. Any Fusion title template works the same way, and once it's on the header it overrides the track and per-caption styling from the Inspector. I'd save the plain look with Save Track as Preset first, because the template takes over that styling on the whole track.

Run a Real Caption QC Pass

Don't proof captions only while parked on single frames. Watch the program at normal speed with sound, then watch the tricky sections muted. The first pass checks fidelity to speech; the muted pass shows whether the text can stand on its own.

1. Correct spelling, names, numbers and technical terms.
2. Make sure each cue begins with its phrase and clears before the next speaker or idea.
3. Remove stray double spaces and inconsistent punctuation.
4. Label meaningful non-speech audio when the delivery calls for accessible captions.
5. Check captions over the brightest and busiest shots.
6. Confirm every active language track has the intended label and content.
7. Export a short test and check the actual output outside Resolve.

Find and Replace is great for a surname that's misspelled the same way everywhere, but review each replacement in context before you hit Replace All. A short word can hide inside a longer one, and capitalization may differ at the start of a cue.

Export SRT, Embedded Captions or Burned-In Subtitles

Go to the Deliver page and open Subtitle Settings at the bottom of the Video panel. Turn on Export Subtitle, pick the right subtitle track, then match the mode to the destination.

The diagram below shows what each of the three Format choices listed in the delivery section of the Resolve 21.1 manual produces.

For a separate file, Deliver in Resolve 21 offers IMSC1, DFXP, SRT and WebVTT. File > Export Subtitle and the Export Subtitle command on the subtitle-track header give you SRT and VTT.

SRT is accepted almost everywhere but it's plain, so don't expect it to keep your Resolve typeface or background box. When the look has to be permanent, choose Burn into video and check the rendered file for clipping, line wrapping and timing.

Embedded delivery depends on the container. Resolve 21 documents CEA-608 inside MXF OP1A and QuickTime, with Text or CEA-608 codec choices where supported, and QuickTime or MXF renders can carry several subtitle tracks in one file. Confirm the receiver, container, caption standard, language metadata and frame rate before rendering a long master. The general video export guide covers codecs and render settings; this page sticks to the subtitle payload.

Fix Common Subtitle Problems

The imported subtitles are missing

Zoom out and compare the SRT's first timestamp with the timeline start timecode. The cues may have landed exactly where they should, at a time your current timeline doesn't reach. Also make sure the subtitle track is visible and enabled.

Every cue is early or late by the same amount

That's usually an offset, not drift. Move the imported group together or fix the zero point in the SRT workflow. Don't retime every cue on its own.

The error grows toward the end

Drift that grows points to a duration or timing-base mismatch. Check whether the program was speed-changed, frame-rate converted or re-edited after the subtitle file was generated.

The font and box disappear from the exported SRT

That's expected. SRT stores cue timing and text, not Resolve's whole visual design. Burn the subtitle track into the picture when the exact look is mandatory, or use a delivery format and player that support the styling you need.

Automatic subtitles are not available

Built-in speech-to-text subtitle creation needs Resolve Studio. Manual cues, SRT import, track styling and subtitle delivery don't depend on the AI generation step.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can the free version of DaVinci Resolve add subtitles?

Yes. The free edition can create a subtitle track, add cues by hand, import SRT files, adjust timing and style, and export or burn in subtitles. Create Subtitles from Audio belongs to the Studio speech-to-text toolset.

How do I import an SRT file into DaVinci Resolve?

In the Media Pool, right-click a bin or its background, choose Import Subtitle, then put the imported subtitle clip on a subtitle track. Check the first cue, the timeline start timecode and the last cue before you style the track.

Why are imported subtitles one hour out of sync?

The SRT may start near zero while the timeline starts at 01:00:00:00, or the other way round. Line up the timecode ranges for absolute placement, or place the SRT relative to the playhead when that suits the project.

Does SRT preserve subtitle fonts and styling?

No. Standard SRT carries cue numbers, timestamps and text, and not much else. Burn subtitles into the video when the exact font, position, outline or background has to survive delivery.

Should I use subtitles or Text+ for animated captions?

Use the subtitle track for long, exportable captions and multiple languages. Use Text+ or Fusion titles when per-word animation and free graphic placement matter more than exporting a caption file.

Can DaVinci Resolve translate subtitles automatically?

Don't plan around a native translation step: the subtitle chapter of the Resolve 21.1 manual doesn't document one. A dependable localization route is to export a timed subtitle file, translate and review it outside Resolve, then import the translated file onto its own language track.

This guide sits in the DaVinci Resolve tutorial map. For the next step, use the transcription guide when audio has to become text, the Text+ guide for animated graphics, or the export settings hub when the subtitle decision is part of a bigger delivery workflow.

Jason Miller I run DaVinci Resolve Club, an independent publication. My guides explain editing, color, Fairlight, Fusion and delivery, with clear Free vs Studio limits.