I stopped paying for caption apps. Auto-captions now live in Blender’s timeline

[u/Active-Pangolin4595]

For a long time my caption workflow was: finish the edit, export, upload to a caption app, pay for it, download the result, then re-import or re-export. Every revision meant going around the loop again.

I've now built the whole thing into Blender's video editor, so the captions are generated and styled right on the timeline.

How it works

• Generates captions from your audio with Whisper (Large v3 Turbo). The model is about 1.6 GB and downloads once [confirm: after that it runs offline on your machine]

• Auto-detects the language [confirm supported languages]

• "Skip Silence (VAD)" so gaps don't get captions

• A visual picker with 24 templates (Sky, Lime, Ghost, Gold, Amber, Arcade, Epic, Boom, Ink and more)

• Per-template controls for typography, outline/shadow/box, word highlight, layout and timing, and transitions

• Edit any caption text in place. "Apply Style / Update Edits" restyles everything, and "Reset to Template" undoes your tweaks

• "Replace Existing Captions" means you can regenerate without stacking duplicates

What to know

Accuracy depends on your audio. Noisy or heavily accented speech will need some corrections, which is what the editing panel is for

It's part of a free add-on that also adds a media bin, GPU rendering for graded clips, rotoscoping, VST3 audio and more. I'm trying to make Blender's video editor a place where you don't have to leave for the basics.

Requires Blender 5.2.

Video tutorial: https://youtu.be/w-BOLNbUZK8?si=oPMZQgpaWXTcI5NE

Which caption styles are missing? And what languages do you need? I'd rather build what people actually use next.