Automatic subtitles, free and offline

1

Open Auto Captions

Put your video on the timeline, then choose Timeline › Auto Captions (Ctrl + Alt + U). The same button sits in the timeline's toolbar.

Captions can be made for the whole timeline, only the In/Out range, or only the selected clip.

2

Get the speech model once

The speech recognition is whisper.cpp, built into SceneMill. Its model is not part of the installer: the first time, choose one and SceneMill downloads it from huggingface.co. After that it works without the internet.

• Base, 142 MB: fast, fine for clear English
• Small, 466 MB: the recommended one, also good for German and other languages
• Medium, 1.5 GB: the most accurate, and slower

Every download is checked against its checksum before it is used.

3

Pick the language and the look

Let SceneMill detect the language, or choose it: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Japanese or Chinese.

• Standard: two lines at the bottom, as on TV and YouTube
• Short & big: one to three words in the middle, for TikTok, Reels and Shorts. Vertical projects start with this one
• Styles: Classic, Karaoke (the spoken word turns yellow), Box, Pop, Reveal, Bounce and One word

Click Create captions. The first run takes a moment longer while the model loads.

4

Check the words

The captions arrive as a new subtitle track, every line as its own clip. Play it through, select a line to correct its words in the inspector, and drag its edges to change when it shows. Any step can be undone.

5

Export

• In the export dialog, Burn subtitles into the video draws them into the picture, exactly as the viewer shows them. That is what TikTok and Reels need
• File › Export Subtitles saves an SRT or WebVTT file, for YouTube or a video player
• File › Import Subtitles brings in SRT and WebVTT files from elsewhere