How it works
- Drop the Short, 60 seconds or less.
- Press Make captions. The yellow preset is selected here.
- Edit, then Burn into video, or take the SRT and add it in YouTube Studio.
You have two routes for a Short. YouTube Studio accepts an SRT file under Subtitles, and viewers can switch it on. Or you burn the text into the picture so it shows for everyone, including people who never turn captions on.
Yellow with a black outline reads well on both bright and dark footage. The size is set from the video height, so a 1080 by 1920 Short and a 720 by 1280 one look the same.
A Short is under 3 minutes, so it fits the free limit. You get SRT, VTT and TXT without paying, and one burned-in export a day with a small mark.
Questions
Does YouTube not do this itself?
It makes automatic captions, in its own look, and viewers must turn them on. Burned-in text is part of the video.
Which resolution should I use?
Use the file you would upload anyway. The caption size follows the height of the video.