How to add captions or text to a video on a Mac

You have a clip and you want words on it — a hook, a title, a "Day 1", a punchline. You shouldn't need a timeline editor, an account, or an upload for that. Here's how to burn text into a video on a Mac in about a minute, 100% offline — either by typing it into a panel or by literally asking for it in plain English.

The fastest way: just ask

Crisp has a plain-English box ("Or just tell Crisp what to do…"). Drop your video in and type what you want:

• add a caption saying "Day 1"
• put the words POV: you finally booked the trip on it
• add text that says GOAL at the top

Crisp reads the request, keeps your quoted text verbatim (capitalization and all), and understands placement — say "at the top" and it goes top; otherwise it defaults to the bottom, where captions usually live. It shows you the plan, fills in the Caption panel with your text, and you press Add caption. If you ask for a caption without saying what it should say, Crisp opens the panel and asks you to type the text — it never guesses words to put on your video.

It's honest about limits, too: ask it to remove captions that are already burned into a clip and it will tell you straight that it can't — erasing baked-in text is generative inpainting, which Crisp doesn't do.

The manual way: the Caption lane

1. Open Crisp and drop in your video

   Get the free Crisp app for Mac and drag your clip onto the window. Nothing is uploaded — the whole job runs on your Mac.

2. Pick Caption and type your text

   Choose Caption in the task row and type what you want on screen — up to 120 characters, and longer text wraps onto multiple lines automatically. Captions are for videos; if you've staged a photo, Crisp will nudge you to pick a video clip.

3. Choose a style and position

   Four clean, social-ready styles: white text on a dark pill, black text on a light pill, white text with a shadow, or yellow text with a shadow. Place it at the bottom, top or center of the frame.

4. Set when it shows (optional)

   Two fields — show from → to, in seconds (e.g. 1 → 4). Leave them blank and the caption stays up for the whole clip. Crisp sanity-checks the numbers for you: the end has to come after the start, and the start has to be inside the clip.

5. Press Add caption

   The text is rendered at a large reference size, scaled cleanly to your video's frame, and burned in with hardware encoding. The result plays everywhere — no subtitle track to toggle, no player settings.

Typed captions vs auto-subtitles: an honest note

Crisp burns in text you type. It does not transcribe speech — there's no speech-to-text, no auto-subtitle button. For what most people mean by "add a caption" — a hook, a title, a label, a lower-third, a meme line — typed is exactly right, and it's faster than any transcription flow. But if you need full spoken-dialogue subtitles across a ten-minute talking video, a transcription tool (CapCut's auto-captions, Premiere's speech-to-text, or a Whisper-based app) is the right tool for that job, and you can still bring the clip back to Crisp for everything else. We'd rather tell you that than pretend.

Crisp vs iMovie vs CapCut vs Premiere for this job

	Crisp	iMovie	CapCut	Premiere Pro
Type text on a video	Yes — one panel	Yes — title templates	Yes	Yes
Plain-English request ("add a caption saying…")	Yes	No	No	No
Exact show/hide timing in seconds	Yes — type 1 → 4	Drag clip lengths	Yes — timeline	Yes — timeline
Auto-captions from speech	No — typed text only	No	Yes	Yes
100% offline, no account	Yes	Yes	Account; cloud features	Sign-in + subscription
iPhone HDR handled automatically	Yes — auto tone-map	Mixed results	Often washed out	Manual color setup
Learning curve	~1 minute	Timeline basics	Timeline basics	Steep
Price	Free during beta	Free	Free + Pro upsell	~$23/month

For quick on-screen text, the timeline apps are overkill; for spoken-word transcription, CapCut/Premiere have a feature Crisp deliberately doesn't. Pick by job.

Why offline matters for captions

• Your footage stays yours. The web "add text to video" tools upload your clip to someone's server. Crisp renders and burns in the caption entirely on your Mac — nothing leaves the device.
• No re-compression roulette. Cloud tools transcode on their side; Crisp hardware-encodes locally and writes the file atomically, so you can verify the result immediately.
• Batch without queues. Stage several clips and Crisp applies the same caption to each one — useful for series intros and templated posts.
• It plays everywhere. Burned-in text is part of the picture: Instagram, TikTok, iMessage, old TVs — no subtitle settings required.

FAQ

Can Crisp auto-generate captions from what's spoken?

No — Crisp burns in text you type (titles, hooks, labels, lower-thirds). There's no speech-to-text. For full dialogue subtitles on a long video, use a transcription tool; for exact words on screen in seconds, use Crisp.

Are the captions a subtitle track or burned in?

Burned in — hard-coded into the pixels, so they show up in every app and player with zero settings. Crisp doesn't produce toggleable soft-subtitle tracks.

Can the caption appear only for part of the clip?

Yes — set show-from and show-to in seconds (e.g. 1 → 4). Blank means the whole clip. Need a second caption at a different moment? Run the exported clip through the lane again.

Will it mess with my audio or colors?

No. The original audio is passed through untouched (compositing never touches sound), and HDR sources are tone-mapped to correct standard color automatically.

Can I pick any font?

Crisp keeps it deliberately simple: one clean system typeface in four ready-made styles (dark pill, light pill, white shadow, yellow shadow). No font library to scroll through — and nothing that looks bad by accident.

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