How to remove burnt-in captions so you can reuse old footage
Upload the old videos and tell Vizard Agent the burnt-in captions have to go. Vizard Agent locates the caption band in each file at full resolution, tests removal methods against the actual pixels, picks the one that holds up, and re-cuts the cleaned footage into a new video with fresh captions.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Name the problem before naming the outcome. Otherwise Vizard Agent will cut your footage and add captions on top of the ones already there, which looks exactly as bad as it sounds and is only discovered on playback. Say what the new video is meant to be, too, because that sets the recut.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Reusing published footage means either living with two sets of captions on screen or removing the old ones first, and removing them properly is a measurement job before it is an editing job. Three videos made at different times rarely put their subtitles in exactly the same place. In the session behind this article it:
- Downloaded and probed the three source videos, transcribed all of them and reviewed tiled frame grids from each.
- Located the existing caption band in each source, cropped it at full resolution and inspected what was underneath.
- Tested a blur to hide the old captions and judged it insufficient, since a blur often leaves a smeared rectangle that draws more attention than the text did.
- Tested a cleaner erase method, retested it, and measured each source's speech loudness before cutting.
- Delivered a 37.85-second vertical video, 1080x1920, cut from the three sources with their old subtitles removed and one consistent new caption style running across all of them.
When does this not work well?
Removing text baked into the pixels means reconstructing whatever was behind it, and sometimes there's no good answer, so Vizard Agent shows you its own test rather than promising. Captions over faces are hardest, a static patch fails when the shot pans, and outlines and shadows spread past the letters. Cleaning captions off footage doesn't make it yours, either.
Common questions
Is a blur good enough? Often not. Vizard Agent tests it and moves to a cleaner erase when the blur is visible.
Can it handle several videos at once? Yes. Vizard Agent locates the caption band separately in each file, since they rarely match.
Why not just crop the captions off? On a vertical video that costs a third of the frame. Vizard Agent reconstructs the band and keeps the composition you shot.