What Final Cut Pro accepts
Apple’s guide says Final Cut Pro imports CEA-608 (.scc), iTT (.itt) and SRT (.srt) closed caption files directly into a project. Each closed caption has text, formatting information, and start and end times that Final Cut Pro uses to place it at the right point in the timeline.
WebVTT (.vtt) is not on Apple’s list. If you have VTT, see SRT vs VTT.
Checked against the Final Cut Pro User Guide for Mac, version 12.4, on October 7, 2026.
Make the SRT
Drop your audio or video file on the time coded transcript generator. The first 10 minutes of up to 3 files a day are free without signing up. Longer files use minutes from a pack.
Download the transcript as SRT. Times in the file are written in milliseconds (HH:MM:SS,mmm), not frames. Each cue has at most two lines of 42 characters and lasts at most 7 seconds, and cues never overlap. Automatic transcripts contain mistakes, so check names, numbers and quotes first. You can click any line to correct the text before you download.
Relative to Timeline or Absolute
The import dialog asks for an insertion time, and the two options place the captions differently.
Relative to Timeline positions the closed captions in the timeline by adding the project’s start time to each caption’s start time. If your project starts at 01:00:00:00 and the SRT starts at zero, as the files from the tool do by default, a cue at 00:00:05,000 lands five seconds after the start of the timeline.
Absolute positions each caption at its own start time, regardless of the project’s start time. Use it if you put the project’s start timecode into the SRT with the Start at setting (paid) before you download.
Other editors
The same SRT file imports into Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. See time coded transcript examples for what the file contains.