Captions that work on a phone

If the sound is off, the caption is the preaching. That is how a sermon short gets watched in a queue, a kitchen, or a car park. Pretty type you cannot read at arm's length is not a style. It is a missed sentence.

This is the practical bar we use when we burn captions into a 1080 by 1920 reel.

Time the word, not the paragraph

Give every spoken word a start and an end. Highlight the word being said. The rest of the line can sit at a quieter weight so the eye has a place to land.

Do not dump eight words on screen for two seconds. That is a desktop subtitle. On a phone the thumb has already moved.

Chunk on phrase boundaries. A caption line should be a breath. Split it only if the preacher paused. A single-word flash is fine at the end of a sentence, not in the middle of a clause.

If a name, a place, or a book of the Bible is the point, keep it on screen long enough to read. Transcribers will sometimes hear "sinner" for "centre". Fix that on the review page before you approve.

Size for a phone at arm's length

Hold your own phone at the distance you scroll. If you have to squint, the type is too small.

On a 1080-pixel-wide frame, a short sentence should fill a comfortable width without touching the edges. Looks that feel cinematic on a laptop often need a size bump on a phone. Thin weight disappears on a bright pavement.

Contrast matters more than brand colour. White words with a dark holdout survive a sunlit screen. Yellow on a pale pulpit wall will not. Never cover the mouth or the eyes. Captions live in a band below the chin.

Respect the safe areas

Every platform paints chrome on top of your file.

Leave room at the bottom for the home bar, username, and the platform's own caption field. Leave room at the right for like, comment, and share. Leave a little at the top for the time and the account name.

If you put the church name, the hook title, and a scripture pill in those zones, the platform will sit on them. Design the lower third as if those controls are already there.

A hook title can live in the upper third for the first second or two, then get out of the way. It is a label, not a second sermon.

Burn them in

Burned-in captions (drawn into the pixels) are the ones that travel.

A separate VTT is useful for the archive. It is not what a stranger sees in Shorts. Those surfaces often ignore your sidecar file or delay auto-captions.

Auto-captions fail on names, suburbs, and book titles. Burn the line. Keep a VTT beside the MP4. Edit the words once, then re-render the caption layer. Do not recut the talk to fix a spelling.

Bold versus editorial

You need one look that matches how the sentence lands.

Bold is the default for most Sunday clips. Heavy weight, high contrast, one highlighted word, a little slam on a power word ("mercy", "stay", "go"). Use it when the moment is a punch, a command, or a comfort said out loud. It reads in a noisy feed.

Editorial is quieter. More line length, less slam, type that feels like a pull-quote in a study guide. Use it for a reflective run of teaching, or a pastor who almost never raises their voice. Editorial captions on a shouted finish make the picture and the type argue.

If the source is a back-of-room tripod, bold will forgive more. Pick one look per church and keep it for the series.

Scripture pills

When the preacher cites a verse, put book, chapter, and verse in a small pill, separate from the spoken caption stream. "John 21:17" is a chip. It should not be mixed into "do you love me" as if it were dialogue.

A scanning thumb then knows this is Bible. You can keep the spoken line short.

Place the pill above the spoken line, still inside the safe lower third, and keep it on while the verse is in play. Do not leave it on through a later story. Add the pill only when the words on screen are actually that text. Write the reference the way your church writes it. "Phil" is too cryptic on a phone.

A short edit pass

Before you approve: play it muted and check you still get the thought; play it with sound and check the highlight matches the voice; fix names, places, and verses; check the chin and the platform chrome; confirm the church name is not sitting under a share button.

That is five minutes, not an edit suite. Make the words large, true, and timed to the voice, and the clip will read as a sentence someone actually preached.