Forced Narrative Subtitles (FNS)
Forced Narrative Subtitles (FNS) are subtitle events that must be displayed regardless of whether the viewer has captions or subtitles enabled in their playback settings. They are used when a character speaks in a secondary language that differs from the primary audio track, or when on-screen text is critical to understanding the narrative. Streaming platforms including Netflix, Disney+, and Apple TV+ require FNS events to be identified and, in many cases, delivered as a separate subtitle file alongside the full caption track.
A practical example is a program where the main audio track is English but a character speaks in Klingon or another language. Forced Narrative Subtitles ensure that the translation is shown to all viewers, not only those who have enabled subtitles.
Marking Events as Forced Narrative Subtitles​
Each Event in the editor displays an FS toggle button at the bottom of the Event row. Clicking this button toggles the forced property on the Event. When the FS state is active, the button label turns teal and bold to indicate the Event is marked. Clicking it again removes the forced marking.
To mark multiple Events at once, select them in the editor and right-click to open the context menu. The Forced Subtitle option in the context menu sets forced = true on all selected Events simultaneously. Note that the context menu option is one-directional — it only marks Events as forced and will not remove the marking. To unmark an Event, use the individual FS toggle button on each Event row.
Export Filtering​
Once Events have been marked, the Subtitle Export window provides filtering options that control which Events are included in the output file. The Advanced Options section contains a Forced Subtitles selector with three modes:
Include All outputs every Event regardless of its forced status, which is appropriate for a standard full subtitle or closed caption delivery.
Exclude FNS outputs only Events that have not been marked as Forced Narrative Subtitles, useful when you need to produce a version of the track that omits FNS content.
FNS Only outputs only Events that have been marked as forced, which is used to produce the standalone FNS file required by platforms such as Netflix.
Netflix Two-File Delivery Requirement​
Netflix requires two separate subtitle files for any project that contains Forced Narrative Subtitles. The first file is the complete subtitle track, which must include all FNS events alongside the full dialogue. The second file contains only the FNS events. Netflix's own guidance describes the reason as follows:
"On our service, Forced Narrative subtitles are only displayed if full Subtitles and CC are set to 'off' in the user's playback settings. When the user activates a full Subtitle or CC file, the FN subtitle does not display and for this reason, we require that all Forced Narrative Events are also included in each full Subtitle and SDH/CC file."
To produce both deliverables from the same project, run the Subtitle Export twice: once with the Include All filter to generate the full track, and once with the FNS Only filter to generate the standalone FNS file.