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Style subtitles in the editor’s Subs panel (press S): turn them on, pick a style, then open Edit style to change the layout, font, colors, decorations, and active-word highlighting. Tella generates the subtitles from your transcript automatically.

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Open subtitle styles

  1. Open your video in the Tella editor.
  2. Click Subs in the toolbar, or press S.
  3. Use the toggle beside Subtitles to enable them.
  4. Choose a style under Tella styles to apply it immediately.
  5. Click the settings icon on the selected style to open Edit style.

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Change the layout

Under Layout, you can:
  • Drag Size or enter an exact size in pixels.
  • Adjust Position to move subtitles vertically.
  • Set Lines to 1, 2, or 3 for each subtitle block.
The Lines setting is unavailable when Single-word captions is enabled.

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Customize the text

Under Text, choose a font, weight, text color, and letter case. The font picker includes Tella fonts and any personal or workspace fonts you have uploaded. Changes appear in the Preview above the controls immediately.

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Add decorations

Under Decoration, turn Background, Outline, or Shadow on or off. When you enable an effect, you can also choose its color. The Background color picker also controls opacity. Tella applies the opacity you choose exactly, including a fully opaque background at 100%.
Existing subtitle styles keep their current background appearance. Choosing a new Background color applies the color and opacity shown in the picker.

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Highlight the active word

Under Active word, choose how Tella emphasizes the word currently being spoken:
  • None applies no active-word effect.
  • Text changes the active word’s color.
  • Background places a colored background behind the active word.
  • Fade the rest dims the other words.
In multi-word captions, active-word color and dimming ease in and out rather than switching instantly. The background behind an active word shrinks and fades after that word ends. With Text active-word highlighting, the Backdrop style shows unspoken words at half opacity and brings them to full opacity as they are spoken; if you choose an active-word color, they also transition to that color. The base Backdrop style now has word highlighting enabled without a separate highlight color. You can also enable Single-word captions to show only the word being spoken. See Show one word at a time in captions.

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Caption motion and existing videos

Multi-word subtitle blocks spring into view and animate out in the Backdrop, Highlight, Mono, Cannes, and Classic styles. The Backdrop background also has smoothed corners. Single-word captions do not move between words. This motion applies to existing videos too: the next time you render or export one with burned-in subtitles, its captions will use the updated animation. On shared videos, styled subtitle playback depends on the viewer’s device and browser, as described below.

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Save and reuse a style

  1. Customize a subtitle style in Edit style.
  2. Click Save as preset.
  3. Return to the Subtitles panel and find it under Your styles.
Open a saved style’s More actions menu to Customize, Rename, Duplicate, or Delete it. Your saved styles are available in your other videos.

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Edit the subtitle text

Click Edit subtitles at the top of the Subtitles panel. The editable subtitles open in the Subtitles view of the right-side Script panel. You can also open the Script panel, open its menu, and click Subtitles. See Edit with the transcript for more.

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Subtitles on shared videos

On the video watch page and in embedded videos, subtitles use the same drawing style as burned-in subtitles in an export when your viewer’s browser and device support hardware WebGPU. If the subtitle renderer is unavailable or fails (including when the selected font cannot load), viewers see the video’s caption track in their browser’s default caption style instead. Your chosen font, colors, and active-word effects won’t appear in that fallback. When subtitles are on by default, the watch page starts loading the subtitle renderer after the page loads and the browser is idle. If a viewer starts playback before it’s ready, subtitles appear once the styled renderer is ready; the browser’s default captions do not appear temporarily during loading. Viewers can still turn subtitles on or off in the player.
Last modified on September 28, 2026