Auto captions in After Effects: a repeatable subtitle workflow

Captions decide whether a social edit is watched on mute or skipped. They are also the most repetitive job in the timeline, which is exactly why they should be automated.

The workflow: transcribe the audio, review the transcript as text, split it into readable lines, then let the panel build timed text layers with one style applied to all of them. Editing the style once updates the track.

Mistake one is line length. Two lines, roughly 40 characters each, is the ceiling before viewers stop reading. Mistake two is timing padded too tightly to the waveform — add a few frames of lead so words appear just before they are spoken. Mistake three is placement: keep captions above the platform UI safe area, or half your text is hidden behind a username.

If you already captioned elsewhere, import the SRT instead of re-transcribing. Ghostae Text builds the layers from the file and applies your preset, which keeps a series visually consistent across editors.

For multilingual delivery, transcribe once and translate the text layer contents, keeping timings intact. It is far faster than restarting the caption pass per language.