How to add captions to a clip without uploading it anywhere
Every caption tool wants your file on their server first. Here is the version where your file never gets uploaded.
The short version
- On-device speech recognition is accurate enough for social captions and needs no internet connection.
- Burned-in captions survive re-uploads and autoplay-muted feeds, which soft subtitle tracks do not.
- Word-level timing is what makes captions feel alive: block, word-by-word and karaoke are three different looks.
- Reframing to 9:16 and burning captions should happen in the same export pass, not as two round trips.
This is a placeholder article. It exists to demonstrate the template and the enforced frontmatter contract. The real corpus is not written yet. See
DESIGN_SPEC.md§12.
Why “offline” is the hard part
Captioning itself is a solved problem. Doing it without handing your raw footage to a third party is the part most tools quietly skip: the upload is the product. If your recording is unreleased, under NDA, or simply four hours long on a slow connection, that round trip is the whole cost.
The five steps
- 01Drop the recording in
Drag your file onto the window. It is read from disk. There is no upload progress bar because there is no upload.
- 02Transcribe on-device
The bundled speech model timestamps every word locally, which is what makes word-level animation possible later.
- 03Pick the moment
Search the transcript for the phrase you remember saying, or start from a moment the app already marked.
- 04Choose a treatment
Block, word-by-word or karaoke, then font, colour and placement. Translation runs locally too.
- 05Export both ratios
9:16 and 16:9 in one pass, captions burned in, no watermark.
Choosing between block, word-by-word and karaoke
Block captions show a full line at a time and are the calmest to read, good for talking-head and interview clips. Word-by-word pops each word as it is said and suits high-energy edits. Karaoke keeps the line on screen and highlights the active word, which is the best of both when the line matters more than the beat.
Press Space to preview before you commit to a look.
Frequently asked
Do offline captions need a GPU?
No. A GPU makes transcription faster, but the models run on CPU on any normal modern laptop or desktop. Expect your first clip in seconds either way.
Are burned-in captions better than a subtitle file?
For social platforms, yes. Feeds autoplay muted and most re-encode or strip subtitle tracks, so text that is part of the picture is the only text that reliably survives.
Can I caption in a language I did not speak?
Yes. ClutchClip ships an on-device translation model, so an English recording can be captioned in Spanish without a cloud translation API seeing the transcript.
How we compare and test
Everything we say about ClutchClip is checked against the shipping build on Windows and macOS. If it is on this site, it works in the app. Competitor facts come from the vendor's own public pricing and feature pages, are quoted with the date we checked them, and are re-checked before each update to this page. We do not run affiliate links, and we say plainly where a competitor is the better fit. Spot something stale?Tell usand we will fix it and re-date the page.
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