Why I built MotionCaption

I have been working in After Effects for 14 years. I do almost everything there, including the parts most people take to Premiere.

For most of that time, captions meant editing every text layer by hand. Adding the punctuation myself. Changing the color of the key words one at a time. And after all that work, the captions still did not move.

Apps like CapCut put a whole preset library one tap away, but the caption editor was not good, and it meant leaving After Effects to finish the edit somewhere else. A few extensions existed, and none of them worked the way I wanted. Small preset libraries, locked templates, or captions baked into the picture where I could not touch them again. Adobe still has nothing like this built in, even today.

By then I had moved on. I was not making captions anymore, I had gone deep into expressions and scripting, writing my own tools for After Effects. Then someone in a Discord for Adobe script developers asked how to build an animated captions plugin from scratch. I wanted one for After Effects, which has no captions at all, and by then I had the expressions and scripting to build it. I thought: I can do this.

So I built it as a product from day one, and put everything I could into it. 330+ animated caption presets in After Effects and 80+ in Premiere. Animated boxes behind the text. Emojis, media, AI. A real editor for the text, the timing, and the words you want to stand out. All of it without leaving Adobe.

Premiere came next, when the first feedback I got asked for it.

I built the tool I did not have, and I keep making it better. If captions are the slow part of your edit, it is for you. 💜