The Rent Was Always the Point

CapCut Pro can caption your video automatically. You click the button, it transcribes your audio, and it drops the text onto the timeline. At least, that’s the pitch.

In practice I spent more time fixing the captions that I would have spent typing them. It misheard technical words and gave me styling options that were close to what I wanted but never quite there. Every video, I would generate, then go back and repair.

At some point I stopped and asked why I was paying for this. The captions were the main reason I subscribed to CapCut pro at all. Everything else in my edit I could do elsewhere. So over an afternoon I built my own caption tool. It transcribes, it lets me style the text the way I actually want, and it is free. I does one thing, and it does the one thing I needed.

Once the captions were handled, CapCut had nothing left to offer me. The feature I had been renting the whole app for was gone, and with it the reason to stay subscribed. I am moving my editing to DaVinci Resolve, which is more capable (and also free), and I have not opened CapCut since.

I do not think this is really a story about captions.

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