How to add subtitles in DaVinci Resolve

Resolve's free tier is the reason a lot of creators are on it in the first place, and its subtitle tooling is more manual than CapCut's or Premiere's. Here's how to get captions onto a Resolve timeline without retyping a transcript by hand.

Option 1: the built-in subtitle track

Edit page → right-click the track header → Add Subtitle Track, then double-click into it and type each cue while playing back. It works, and Resolve (particularly the free edition) has no built-in transcription to speed this up: every word is typed by hand.

Option 2: Text+ captions

Fusion-based Text+ titles give more styling control than the plain subtitle track, at the cost of more setup per cue. Reasonable for a handful of stylized captions, tedious for a full talking-head video.

Resolve has no command to turn a subtitle track into Text+ titles, which is why the usual answers to this are a paid plugin, a Python script, or a third-party website. There is a simpler route: import an FCPXML. Resolve reads it and builds one editable Text+ title per cue at the right timecode, in a single import, on the free edition.

Option 3: import an SRT

File → Import → Subtitle drops a properly timed SRT straight onto the timeline as its own subtitle track: no retyping, and it inherits whatever styling you set on the track afterward. This is the fast path if the transcript comes from somewhere with word-level timing already attached.

1. Extract audio from your file, or use an audio-only source directly.
2. Transcribe and run forced alignment so every word carries its own timestamp.
3. Set line breaks (fixed word count or natural sentence boundaries) and fix anything that reads oddly.
4. Export SRT.
5. In Resolve: File → Import → Subtitle (or right-click an empty area of the Media Pool → Import Subtitle), then place it on the timeline.

Common problems

• Cues land at the wrong point in the timeline: the SRT's zero point has to match your timeline start. If your timeline begins at 01:00:00:00, the SRT needs to as well, or every cue is offset by that amount.
• Garbled characters: make sure the SRT is UTF-8 encoded before importing.
• Only plain text shows up: SRT never carried styling to begin with. Style the imported track directly in Resolve.

Frequently asked questions