How to Add Auto Captions in Premiere Pro 2026 and Save Caption Presets

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There’s a way using which you can add auto captions in Premiere Pro; it automatically generates subtitles, helping you save hours of work while making your videos more accessible and engaging.

If you create videos regularly, adding captions manually can quickly become one of the most time-consuming parts of the editing process.

In this post, you’ll learn how to generate auto captions in Premiere Pro, animate them to match your editing style, save your caption animation as a preset, and reuse it in future projects to speed up your workflow.

Whether you’re editing YouTube videos, Instagram Reels, or client projects, this method will help you create professional-looking captions in just a few clicks.

Let’s get started.

Steps to add auto captions in Premiere Pro

1. Import your video

Drag and drop your video clip onto your timeline.

2. Check this next

Click on Window on the top menu and check if Text is enabled.

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3. Create a transcript

As the Text menu appears, click on Transcript to create one. And then click on CC to create automatic captions from it.

4. Create auto captions in Premiere Pro

When you click on CC, this dialog box will appear,

In layout, choose single line and keep the maximum length in characters as 17 (you can change this as per your choice).

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5. Styling the auto captions

The easiest way to style the captions is to convert them into a graphic first.

Select all of the generated captions on the timeline by holding left-click and dragging across them.

Go to Graphics and Titles and click on Upgrade to Graphics.

Then select the first caption by clicking on it and start styling it according to your liking.

For example, choosing the font, size, adding a shadow, glow, etc.

Go to Properties on the menu situated on the right-side panel for this.

Keep scrolling down to reveal more styling options for glow, shadow, stroke, color, alignment, position, etc.

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6. Save the auto caption preset

This comes in handy.

Once you’re happy with the captions, you can save that style as a preset to use in your future projects.

You have to stylise the captions just once.

Here’s how to do this.

Keeping the first set of captions selected, the one you styled, keep the Properties tab open and scroll to the end.

Select Linked Style and click on the + icon to create a style and save it as a subtitle preset.

Make sure to save it to Local Styles so that this preset is available for all of your projects. If you choose only Save to project, the preset will be available only in the current project you’re working on.

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