Abstract The movement of molten metal at the wire end in submerged arc welding (SAW) was filmed by a high-speed video camera through a preset tunnel, the welding electric signal was acquired simultaneously. A physical modeling experiment was carried out to simulate the metal transfer in SAW. Welding electric signal shows that the stability of welding process is higher at medium current, but it could not reflect the metal transfer behavior completely. Combining high-speed videos for welding and physical modeling experiment, it is suggested that there might be three metal transfer modes with the increase of welding current, which in turn are: repelled globular transfer without short-circuit, flux-wall guided transfer without short-circuit and flux-wall guided transfer with short-circuit. Analysis result suggests that the arc would always burn even when short-circuit is ongoing in high-current SAW, which is quite different from the short-circuit in gas metal arc welding (GMAW).