How To Add Captions And Subtitles To IMovie - Sonix

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Skip to content Resources → Education How to add captions and subtitles to iMovie January 18, 2026 · 2 min read

How to add captions and subtitles to iMovieIn this article

4 simple steps to automate subtitles for your iMovie videos

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Apple’s iMovie is a video editing platform made for iOS and Mac devices. If you want subtitles on your iMovie videos you’ve come to the right place.

Unfortunately, iMovie doesn’t provide a mechanism to upload caption files so you’ll have to add them manually frame by frame if you want to do it inside iMovie. However, there is a faster, better and easier way using automated subtitle software like Sonix.

4 simple steps to automate subtitles for your iMovie videos

Step 1: Upload video to Sonix and receive automated transcript

Step 2: Edit transcript

Step 3: Click the “Subtitles” drop-down menu and choose character length / duration

Step 4: Click “Burn-in” under “Subtitles” menu

That’s it. It will take a few minutes to render your video and you’ll have a video with subtitles you can share anywhere.

Automated subtitles using Sonix. Fast, easy, accurate, and affordable.

If you really want to do it manually inside iMovie, here are 7 steps to manually add subtitles to iMovie:

Inside iMovie click “File”, “Import Media” and select your file.
Drag your file into the Timeline inside iMovie.
Click “Titles” and select a title.
Drag the title down to the timeline and position it with the speaker.
Once the caption is placed in the Timeline you can remove excess text boxes.
It’s a good idea to play back what you’ve just created to make sure the text aligns with what the speaker is saying.
Edit as necessary and repeat for following frames/scenes.