How to Remove Text from a Video
Erase text overlays, subtitles, and captions in 3 steps.
Upload Your Video
Drag & drop or select the video with the text, subtitles, or captions you want removed. Supports MP4, MOV, WebM and more.
Choose Automatic or Manual
Automatic finds the text by itself. Manual lets you draw a box around the text you want gone and set when it appears.
Check the Preview, then Download
AI removes the text frame by frame and rebuilds the background. Processing usually takes a few minutes; the result also appears under My videos.
What Text Can You Remove from Videos?
Wipe AI removes most burned-in text: subtitles, captions, text watermarks, and on screen labels.
Burned-In Subtitles
Remove hardcoded subtitles that are baked into the video itself and cannot be turned off with a player setting.
Caption Overlays
Erase auto generated captions, on screen captions from TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and more.
Watermark Text
Remove text based watermarks like usernames, domain names, or copyright notices that appear on every frame.
Date & Time Stamps
Remove date, time, and location stamps burned into surveillance footage, drone videos, or action cam recordings.
Title Cards & Credits
Remove opening title cards, lower thirds, or credits that were baked into the video during export.
Any On Screen Label
Draw a box around any text anywhere on screen and the AI removes it across every frame where the box is active.
Hardcoded Text vs Soft Subtitles: Why It Matters
Before removing text from a video, it's worth understanding what kind of text you're dealing with because the technique varies completely. There are two fundamentally different categories:
- Soft subtitles (closed captions): Stored as a separate text track inside the video file (SRT, VTT, or embedded as subtitle streams in MKV/MP4 containers). These can be toggled on/off in any video player and removed cleanly using free tools like FFmpeg or HandBrake no AI needed. If your video has soft subtitles, you can disable them in seconds without touching the actual video pixels.
- Hardcoded text (burned in): Rendered directly into the video pixels at export time. Cannot be toggled off because it's part of the picture itself. This is what Wipe AI removes. Common examples: TikTok captions, YouTube auto generated subtitles that were rendered in, news ticker text, on screen titles, social media graphics, song lyric overlays, meme captions.
If you're not sure which type your video has, try playing it in VLC and toggling subtitles off (Subtitle → Subtitle Track → Disable). If the text disappears, it was soft. If it stays, it's hardcoded and that's where Wipe AI comes in.
Auto Detect Mode: How It Finds Text Without You Marking It
For videos with many text overlays (animated captions, scrolling lyrics, news tickers), drawing a box for each one is tedious. In Automatic mode Wipe AI reads the video for text, then removes every line it found in one pass.
Subtitles in English and other Latin-alphabet languages, and in Cyrillic, are detected for everyone. For Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Wipe AI adds the matching text model based on your browser language, so set your browser to that language if most of your videos use it.
- Latin scripts: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Romanian.
- Cyrillic: Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian.
- Devanagari: Hindi, Marathi, Nepali.
- Arabic script: Arabic, Urdu, Persian.
- CJK: Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Dense characters can leave faint outlines.
Automatic is the right choice when text appears in many places. For a single title, label or watermark, Manual mode with one box is faster and more precise.
Common Sources of Burned-In Text
The most common situations where users need text removal:
- TikTok auto captions: TikTok's built in caption generator burns text into the video at upload. Once posted, the only way to remove the captions is AI inpainting.
- News and TV broadcasts: Lower thirds, scrolling tickers, station bugs, breaking news banners all hardcoded.
- Lyric videos: Animated lyrics rendered into the video pixels by the original creator.
- Educational content: Tutorial videos with on screen instructions, formulas, or step labels.
- Subtitled foreign films: Translated dialogue burned into the video, common on pirated or repackaged content where the original soft subtitle track was lost.
- Social media memes: Top/bottom text rendered on viral video clips.
- Date/time stamps: Camera burned timestamps from old camcorders, security camera footage, or dashcams.
When AI Text Removal Is Most Effective
AI inpainting works best in these conditions:
- Background changes over time: If the camera moves or the subject moves, the AI sees the area "without text" in nearby frames and uses that as reference. Static scenes with text on a still background are slightly harder.
- Text contrasts strongly with background: White text on a dark background, or vice versa, gives the AI a clean edge to work with. Text that blends into the background (similar colors) is more challenging.
- Higher resolution input: 1080p videos give the AI more pixel context than 480p. Always start from the highest quality version available.
- Text stays in roughly the same area: Captions that stay near the bottom of the screen are easier to clean than text that bounces around the entire frame.
What to Do When Text Sits Over a Face
Burned-in text overlays often land on faces particularly TikTok captions positioned at face level. AI inpainting can reconstruct most facial features convincingly, but eyes, mouth, and fine skin texture sometimes show subtle artifacts. Two strategies:
- Crop instead of inpaint if the text is near the bottom or top edge.
- Re-record if it's your own content and you can repeat the take with the caption positioned away from the face.
- Accept minor artifacts if neither option is feasible Wipe AI's output is still significantly better than blur or crop.
Related Tools
Different text removal needs have specialized workflows. See our dedicated guides for: subtitle removal, brand bug removal, and platform specific tools for TikTok Watermark Remover, CapCut Watermark Remover, and Kinemaster watermarks.
Text on TikTok, Reels and Other Vertical Videos
Vertical 9:16 videos from TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts usually place captions in the middle of the frame, right over faces and products. Automatic mode finds these captions in every frame, even when they pop in word by word, and the result keeps the full 9:16 frame: nothing is cropped or zoomed. The free plan exports at 480p; paid plans export at up to 1080p.
Wipe AI runs in the browser, so it works on an iPhone, an Android phone or a computer without installing an app. On a phone the editor uses Automatic mode; to mark text by hand with boxes, open the same video on a computer.