Get your captions out
CapCut to SRT
CapCut writes brilliant auto-captions and then makes them almost impossible to take with you. Drop your draft file here and get a proper .srt subtitle file for YouTube, Premiere, Resolve or your editor — free, in seconds, with no sketchy desktop app or GitHub script.
Drop draft_content.json or a zipped draft folder
The captions are read right here in the tab — your project file is never uploaded.
The creator lock-in problem
Auto-captioning is the reason a lot of people edit in CapCut at all: it is fast, it is accurate enough, and it styles the words for you. The catch appears the first time you need those words somewhere else — as a YouTube subtitle track so the video is searchable and accessible, as an .srt for a client's professional editor, or simply as text for a blog post or a translation. CapCut's export dialog offers a rendered video and little else, so the caption data stays locked inside the app.
The usual workarounds are worse than the problem. Some people re-transcribe the finished video with a paid service they have already paid CapCut's parent company to do once. Others download an unsigned desktop utility from a forum, or clone a Python script and install a runtime just to read a JSON file. None of that is reasonable for someone who only wants subtitles for their own video.
What is actually in the draft
A CapCut project is a folder, and inside it draft_content.json describes the whole timeline. Caption text lives in the materials section; when each caption appears lives in the track segments, measured in microseconds. Joining those two lists in the right order is the entire job — this page does it in your browser, merges captions that CapCut split into several segments, separates overlapping cues that players choke on, and writes standards-compliant SRT or WebVTT.
No draft file to hand? The video-to-text transcriber generates timed subtitles from the exported video itself, also on your own device.
Step by step
1. Find your CapCut draft folder
Desktop: Documents / CapCut Drafts (Windows) or Movies / CapCut / User Data / Projects / com.lveditor.draft (Mac). Android: the CapCut folder in internal storage. Each project is a folder named after your video.
2. Take draft_content.json out of it
That single file holds every caption plus its exact timing. Older CapCut builds call it draft_info.json. You can also zip the whole draft folder and drop that instead.
3. Drop it on this page
The captions are parsed in the browser and listed with their timecodes so you can check them before exporting.
4. Download SRT, VTT or a plain transcript
SRT uploads straight to YouTube and imports into Premiere, Resolve and Final Cut. VTT is for web players. The transcript is for blog posts and show notes.
Questions people ask
- Can you export SRT from CapCut directly?
- Not in any straightforward way. CapCut generates excellent auto-captions but only offers to burn them into the exported video, which turns editable text into pixels. The caption text and its timings do exist on your machine inside the project's draft file — this page reads that file and writes a standard subtitle file from it.
- Which file exactly do I need?
- draft_content.json from inside the project folder (draft_info.json in older versions). If you cannot tell which folder belongs to which video, sort the folders by modified date, or just compress the whole CapCut drafts folder and drop the ZIP here — the right file is found automatically.
- Is my project uploaded?
- No. The JSON is read with the browser's own file reader and parsed in this tab. Nothing is transmitted, which also means the tool works offline once the page has loaded.
- Why do some captions look duplicated in CapCut but not in the SRT?
- CapCut often splits a caption that stays on screen across several timeline segments. Consecutive segments with identical text are merged into one subtitle so YouTube does not show the same line flickering twice, and overlapping cues are nudged apart because most players refuse to display them.
- Can I edit the captions before uploading them?
- Yes — an .srt file is plain text. Open it in any text editor, fix a name or a number, and save. The timings are the lines with arrows and should be left alone.
- What if my draft has no captions yet?
- Run CapCut's auto-caption feature first and save the project so the text is written into the draft file. If the tool reports captions without timings, the project is likely still processing — reopen it in CapCut, wait for it to finish and export again.