How to make an SRT file, from the finished cut to a .srt that works

The client’s social team asks for “the SRT” on a Friday afternoon, and the cut went out without subtitles. Or the subtitles exist, burned into last week’s version, and the YouTube upload needs them as a separate file.

Either way you need a .srt that matches the version going out.

An SRT is plain text. You can type one in Notepad, export one from the editing software or build one from a transcript, and each route has a step where things tend to go wrong.

What goes inside an SRT file

Each subtitle in an SRT has four parts in a fixed order: a number, a timing line, the text and a blank line. Three subtitles from a short testimonial:

1
00:00:00,800 --> 00:00:03,700
We opened the first store
in a garage in 2009.

2
00:00:04,200 --> 00:00:06,000
Today there are forty-two.

3
00:00:06,500 --> 00:00:09,000
And we still answer
every email ourselves.

The numbers start at 1 and go up by one. The timing line holds the in time and the out time, separated by an arrow made of two hyphens and a greater-than sign, with a space on each side.

Times are hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds, with a comma before the milliseconds, so 00:00:03,700 is three seconds and seven tenths. The text takes one or two lines, and the blank line tells the player the subtitle is over.

The comma is what people get wrong most often, usually because they started from a VTT file, which puts a dot there. The other differences are in our post on SRT vs VTT.

Typing an SRT by hand

For a 30-second social cut with eight subtitles, typing the file is quicker than anything else. Use a plain text editor, not a word processor.

On Windows that’s Notepad. On a Mac, TextEdit works once you choose Format > Make Plain Text.

Play the cut in your editing software and write down where each line starts and ends. The timeline counts frames and the SRT wants milliseconds, so divide the frame number by the frame rate.

At 25 fps, frame 12 is 480 milliseconds, and 00:00:04:12 becomes 00:00:04,480. At 24 fps the same frame is 500 milliseconds.

Our post on reading timecode has more on frames and on why timelines often start at one hour.

Save as UTF-8 with the .srt extension, and watch whether the app adds .txt. Windows hides known extensions by default, so a file that looks like interview.srt can be interview.srt.txt, and upload forms won’t read it as a subtitle file. In Notepad, set the file type to All files before saving.

Exporting an SRT from Premiere or Resolve

If the subtitles were made in the edit, as a caption track in Premiere Pro or a subtitle track in DaVinci Resolve, export them from there.

In Premiere, open Export mode for the sequence. The Captions section of the export settings has a menu called Export Options. Choose Create Sidecar File, then SubRip Subtitle Format (.srt) as the file format, and Premiere writes the SRT next to the video.

The same menu can burn the captions into the picture, so check which option is selected. Adobe’s help says the caption track that’s active in the timeline is selected by default.

In Resolve, the Deliver page has a Subtitle Settings section. Turn on Export Subtitle, choose to export it as a separate file and pick SRT. The File menu can also export the subtitle track on its own.

Blackmagic’s reference manual covers both, and the labels shift a little between versions.

Before sending, open the file and look at the first timing line. If it starts at 01:00:00 and the video starts at zero, the export kept the timeline’s start timecode, and a player will wait an hour before showing anything.

Set the timeline to start at 00:00:00:00 and export again, or shift every timing back an hour in a subtitle editor.

Building an SRT from a transcript

Automatic transcription gives you every word with its own time, and a subtitle tool groups those words into subtitles. The grouping is where the rules matter, such as how many characters fit on a line and where a sentence can break. Our subtitle guidelines have the numbers.

A tool that cuts after a fixed number of words or seconds tends to leave lines ending on “the” and subtitles that blink past before anyone reads them.

Premiere does this inside the edit. It transcribes the sequence in the Text panel and creates captions from the transcript, which export like any other caption track.

YouTube’s auto-sync takes a transcript with no times at all and lines it up with the speech. Its help page says the transcript has to be in the language spoken in the video, and it doesn’t recommend auto-sync for videos over an hour or with poor audio.

Errors in the transcript carry straight into the subtitles, so fix names, numbers and brand names there first. Our guide on how to transcribe a video covers that pass.

Checking the file before it goes out

Play the SRT over the video it belongs to. VLC, like many players, loads a subtitle file with the video’s name from the same folder, or lets you add one from the subtitle menu. Watch the first minute, then jump to the end.

If the first subtitle is on time and the last one is late, with the gap growing as the video plays, the file was timed at a different frame rate.

If everything holds until one point and is off by the same amount from there on, a shot was trimmed or moved after the subtitles were made.

Then read the file in a text editor:

1. Accented letters look right. If “José” shows up as “José”, the file isn’t UTF-8, and the SRT vs VTT post explains the fix.
2. The numbers run in order. Renumber after adding or deleting a subtitle by hand.
3. No subtitle ends after the next one starts, or some players will stack the two on screen.
4. Line length and reading speed stay within what you agreed with the client.

Uploading to YouTube and bringing it back into the edit

In YouTube Studio:

1. Open Subtitles in the left menu and pick the video.
2. Click Add language and choose the language.
3. Under Subtitles, click Add, then Upload file, choose With timing, continue, select the .srt and save.

YouTube’s help asks for basic SRT in plain UTF-8 and says it ignores style markup in SRT files.

To bring an SRT into Premiere, import it like any media file and drag it from the Project panel into the sequence. Premiere puts it on a new caption track, where you can style it and burn it in if the client wants open captions.

In Resolve, the File menu imports subtitle files, and dragging one onto the timeline creates a subtitle track.

Whether the client needs a separate file or text in the picture is covered in closed captions vs subtitles.

How this works in RecReview

In RecReview, a version with audio that goes through AI Review gets its transcript automatically, with no AI minutes beyond the review.

For other versions, open the Transcript tab on the review page, pick Portuguese, English, Spanish or automatic detection and generate it, which uses the workspace’s AI minutes for the length of the video.

Subtitles are built from that transcript by rules based on Netflix’s style guides: up to 42 characters per line, two lines at most and a target of 17 characters per second. The CC button, or Shift+C, turns them on in the player.

Workspace owners, admins and editors, and whoever uploaded the version, can click a subtitle and fix the text in place, with Shift+Enter to break a line and a counter on each line. The timings stay as they were built, and hand edits are kept even if the transcript changes later.

The download menu in the Transcript tab exports SRT, VTT, TXT and JSON. The SRT carries the subtitles the player shows, edits included, numbered from 1 with a comma before the milliseconds and saved as UTF-8. Each version has its own transcript, so download from the version you’re delivering.

RecReview doesn’t burn subtitles into the picture. For open captions, bring the SRT into Premiere or Resolve, export the captioned cut and upload it as a new version for the client to review.