n8n Workflow: Add Burned-In Captions to Google Drive Videos

Add burned-in captions to Google Drive videos automatically with Shotstack + n8n

This n8n workflow watches a specified Google Drive folder for new videos, sends each file to Shotstack for transcription, and then saves a new captioned MP4 back into Google Drive—with captions burned directly into the video.

What this workflow does

• Detects new videos in Google Drive: triggers when a new video file is created in your selected folder.
• Enables Shotstack access: updates the new Google Drive file’s sharing settings so Shotstack can download it via a public link.
• Renders captions with Shotstack: sends the Drive download URL to Shotstack to produce a new MP4 with burned-in captions generated from the video’s speech.
• Monitors render progress: polls Shotstack every 10 seconds until the render completes or fails.
• Handles failures safely: if the render fails, the workflow stops and returns Shotstack’s error message.
• Saves the result back to Drive: downloads the rendered captioned video and uploads it to your destination Google Drive folder as a new “(captioned)” copy.

Use cases

• Turn meeting recordings stored in Google Drive into captioned training clips for wider accessibility.
• Automate captioning for marketing or instructional videos before publishing or sharing externally.
• Operations teams: ensure every new speech-containing video asset is captioned and archived without manual editing.

Technical details

• Integrations: Google Drive, Shotstack (API key required)
• n8n nodes mentioned in the workflow: if, wait, sticky note, google drive, http request, stop and error
• Important requirement: the video must contain speech—Shotstack transcription depends on spoken audio, and a clip with no spoken audio can fail the render.
• Setup note: output must go to a different Google Drive folder than the watched folder to avoid retrigger loops.