Short vertical video is watched on a phone, often without sound, while the app draws its own buttons and text over your picture. Captions have to be readable at a glance, stay clear of the interface and keep up with fast speech. Here is how to set that up in DaVinci Resolve and do it for a whole video with ROKLIM.
Set up the timeline
Use a vertical timeline, 1080 × 1920, at the frame rate of your footage. ROKLIM counts positions in pixels from the frame centre, so all the numbers below refer to this frame.
Where the captions go
- Keep away from the bottom and the right edge. TikTok, Reels and Shorts put the caption text, the username and the like/comment/share buttons there.
- Keep off the face. In a talking head the safest place is usually the upper-middle area, above the chin line, or the chest area below it — whichever your framing leaves free.
- In ROKLIM this is the zone: Top Tilt / Bottom Tilt / Left Pan / Right Pan in Layout. Turn on the rulers in the Resolve viewer, pull guides around the free area and copy the numbers.
How much text at once
- 1–4 words per group for fast speech; up to 5–6 for slower, calm delivery.
- 2–3 rows at most. In Layout: Words/group and Max rows.
- Let the key row be the biggest: with Colour clips by → Role ROKLIM marks it Big, and you can give it its own colour and animation.
- Break groups at sentence ends: Break on punct with
. ? !.
Readability
- Bold, simple fonts read best at phone size. Calibrate the font once with Auto-measure so rows are packed exactly.
- Keep strong contrast: white or bright text, with a shadow or outline if the background is busy.
- Use colour for meaning, not decoration: one accent colour for the key words is enough.
Motion and sound
- Short, quick animations (a few frames) suit short words; turn on Fit animation to clip length in Animations so long animations are squeezed into short words.
- A soft pop or click under key words adds energy — SFX places them by colour or by word.
- A marker-driven zoom or shake on a punchline — VFX.
Do the whole video fast
- Subtitles: ROKLIM's Create subtitles in Layout, or Resolve Studio's Create Subtitles from Audio (Timeline menu), then fix the text.
- Layout: your zone, 3–4 words per group, colour by Role or Line, RUN.
- Animations: one animation per colour, RUN.
- SFX and VFX if you want them.
- Found a group you love? Save it as a Premade layout and reuse the look for the rest of the video or the next one.
Full walkthrough: animated word-by-word captions in DaVinci Resolve.