Burned-in vs soft subtitles

Soft subs (also called sidecars) are files like .srt or .vtt that travel next to the video. The player turns them on or off and can restyle them. Burned-in (open) captions are painted into the pixels — everyone sees them, and they survive any re-encode.

When soft subs are the right handoff

• YouTube, Vimeo, and most OTT expect a caption file upload or a timed text track — soft subs keep you inside their accessibility and localization tooling.
• HTML5 uses <track kind="captions"> pointing at VTT; burning in bypasses that stack entirely.
• Translation workflows ship multiple language sidecars from one master timeline — impossible if text is baked into one picture.

When burned-in is unavoidable (or preferred)

• Social clips where the export is a single flat MP4 and there is no separate caption upload path.
• Client review when you need pixel-perfect spelling on screen and cannot trust their player settings.
• Projection / live-style playback where no caption track is loaded at all.

Editorial reality

Many jobs need both: a clean soft file for the platform and a burned-in MP4 for Instagram stories or a producer who only watches rough cuts in a group chat. CaptionPass focuses on fixing and validating soft files for delivery — burn-in is usually an NLE or finishing step after text is locked.

Polish an SRT or VTT before upload: open CaptionPass and pick the preset that matches where the file is going.

Related: SRT vs VTT, file encoding.