Export captions

To FCP as titles, to Premiere as SRT, baked into video, or rendered as alpha-channel MOV

The Export menu inside the Captions Editor handles caption-specific outputs. There are four shapes. Pick by what your downstream editor wants.

Send to FCP as Captions

FCPXML 1.10 with editable Motion text titles. Type, color, outline, shadow, and position all carry. The captions land as title clips on a parallel track, fully editable in FCP.

Auto-detects FCP's open library and imports silently. If FCP isn't running with a library open, FCP shows its own picker.

The Glow toggle doesn't survive FCPXML. Color, radius, and blur transfer fine, but the toggle reads as off when FCP imports. We show a toast on export to remind you. Click each glow caption once in FCP's inspector to re-enable. We've covered this in the Style article and on the Send to Final Cut page; bringing it up again because export is when it actually bites.

Send to FCP as Animated Captions

This one renders the captions to an alpha-channel .mov plus an FCPXML that links the source video and the alpha caption track. FCP composites them. Two codec choices: HEVC with Alpha, or ProRes 4444.

Use this when your animation preset needs to look exactly the way it looked in the editor. Type-on, Word Reveal, the bouncy Pop preset, Fade timing curves; all of it bakes into the alpha video and FCP plays it back as a graphic instead of trying to recreate it from titles.

Trade-off: it's a video file. You can't edit the words after the fact without coming back here and re-rendering. Pick this when the look matters more than late-stage text edits.

Captioned video

Bakes the captions into a video file. Two codec choices: H.264 MP4 (~16 Mbps, around 50 MB per 30 seconds at 1080p30) or HEVC MP4 (~10 Mbps).

ProRes 422 isn't offered for caption export. There's an OS-level animation limitation that makes the animated caption render unreliable in that codec, and we'd rather skip the option than ship a broken one. ProRes 4444 is available through the Animated Captions path above.

This is the right output when you're handing a finished video to a publisher, a social platform, or anyone who can't relink files.

Sidecar

SRT, VTT, TXT, or JSON. Plain text caption files, no styling, no animation. SRT goes to Premiere or Resolve cleanly. VTT goes to web players. TXT is for transcripts. JSON has every word with timestamps for whatever pipeline you've got.

These are the most portable outputs and the least styled. If your editor cares about look, use one of the FCP options or bake to video. If your editor cares about words and timing, sidecar is enough.

If you don't use Final Cut Pro

Settings → Final Cut has an "I don't use Final Cut Pro" toggle. Flip it on and the FCP-specific caption export options ("Send to FCP as Captions" and "Send to FCP as Animated Captions") disappear from the menu, replaced with a simple Save action. Tidy if your shop is Premiere or Resolve only and the FCP options are noise. Library browsing of FCP libraries still works either way; this toggle is caption-export only.

A note for Mosaic exports

When you opened the editor against a Mosaic timeline, exports route through the Mosaic workspace's export closure. Same options minus FCP-as-Captions, plus Animated Captions.

If the timeline has changed since these captions were generated, an orange banner shows up at the top of the editor: "Timeline changed since captions were generated." We compare the timeline's current duration against the duration the captions were generated against, with a 0.5 second tolerance for breath and dilation noise.

Two buttons in the banner. Re-transcribe regenerates from the current timeline and runs the preprocessor. Dismiss keeps the existing captions and accepts the drift. Drift inside half a second usually doesn't matter; bigger than that and the captions start floating off the words.

Pick the export that matches what your editor expects. The flexibility is the point: we don't care which NLE you're heading to.