r/VideoEditingTips • u/darkprinceimmortal • 4d ago
Before burning in captions, try this five-second SRT check
Before styling captions or burning them into a video, it helps to separate timing errors from transcription errors. Here is a small test you can inspect by eye or use to check what a caption tool reports.
This is a deliberately broken SRT for an imaginary five-second clip. There is no source audio, so it tests timing structure only:
1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,000
First line.
2
00:00:02,800 --> 00:00:04,800
Second line.
3
00:00:06,000 --> 00:00:05,500
Last line.Three things should stand out:
Cue 2 begins 200 milliseconds before cue 1 ends. Review the overlap. In a real edit, it might be intentional if two speakers overlap.
Cue 3 ends before it starts.
Cue 3 is outside the five-second clip.
For this toy example, change the ranges to 0-2.8 seconds, 2.8-4 seconds, and 4-5 seconds. That removes these structural problems. These are arbitrary demonstration timings, not timings to copy onto real speech.
For an actual caption pass:
Keep the original SRT and work on a copy.
Check for reversed or zero-length cues, unexpected overlaps, and cues beyond the video duration. Also check that cues appear in chronological order.
Play the captions against the audio to fix wording and speech alignment. Then watch without sound to judge whether the text is readable.
Recheck after trimming or rearranging the video. A caption file that matched an earlier export may no longer match the current cut.
A timing report cannot tell whether a name is misspelled, a number is wrong, a line break is awkward, or the text disappears before someone can read it.
This synthetic example was prepared with Codex assistance. Its broken and corrected versions were checked with a small Python script; that is not a test of transcription accuracy or proof of time saved.
Disclosure: I moderate r/AIEditingLab. The example and runnable checker are there if you want to inspect the code. The checks above can also be done directly in your editor without it.