Adding Subtitles: A step by Step guide on how to create and Add captions to your videos

Subtitling and captioning of online video files has grown to become a common trend in the digital marketing space. Regardless of the industry under which your enterprise falls, you now need to ensure that your social media promotional videos include subtitles/closed captions; as this will facilitate increased viewer engagement, increased audience reach, and more business prospects in general.

Market researchers – too- can make good use of confidential transcripts to enhance their research while safeguarding the privacy of sensitive information. With that being said, you must be asking yourself how exactly you can create these subtitle/caption files and subsequently embed them to your video files.

We answer these questions and more below!

Creating Subtitle/Caption Files

There exist a variety of subtitle/caption file formats, with the ‘SubRip Subtitle’ File Format (.srt) being the most commonly used. Other less common formats include ‘.ssa’ and ‘.ass’. Most automation transcription software tools will let you choose which of these formats you’d prefer.

However, this is probably not the route you want to take, as automated online transcription tools score lowly in terms of accuracy of transcripts.

Enter human transcription: you can either create your captions yourself or invest in the services of online transcription professionals. If you’re low on funds and would prefer the former option, we’d recommend you choose the .srt format as it is compatible with a wide variety of media players, video editors, and online video sharing platforms.

SRT files can be created using readily-available, text editing files- with Windows’ Notepad and Mac’s TextEdit being the most notable. However, for fast and accurate transcripts for your video captions, you might wish to entrust your video files that need to be captioned to an online transcription service provider. Credible transcription platforms typically avail transcripts in .srt file format, only leaving you with the simple task of embedding the caption files to your videos.

We discuss both of these human transcription options in detail below.

• Self-Transcription

If you’re working from a Windows PC and would like to use Notepad to create your .srt subtitle/caption files, follow the following steps:

Open up a new notepad file.

• For starters, type in ‘1’ to indicate the beginning of the first captioning sequence, then press ‘enter’.
• Key in the start and end timecode, then press ‘enter’.
• Key in your captions. Remember to break down your captions into smaller, easily digestible text chunks. Press ‘enter’.
• Press ‘enter’ again, with the blank line indicating the beginning of the second captioning sequence.
• Type in ‘2’ to indicate the beginning of the second captioning sequence, then press ‘enter’.
• Repeat the third, fourth and fifth steps shown above, only making changes to the number identifier of the caption sequence and the timecodes, as necessary.
• Once you’re done, save your transcript with a .srt filename extension at the end.

 

• Hiring Transcription Services

While self-transcription will help you cut down on your budget, you may end up with inaccurate transcripts after experiencing mental fatigue while transcribing your video files. Transcription professionals – on the other hand- have long-term experience in daily transcription of long video files; while still keeping errors at a minimum.

What’s more, transcription websites usually break down substantially long video files into multiple, smaller files; assigning each file to a different transcriber that works under them. This facilitates faster turnaround time while helping reduce inaccuracies due to mental fatigue caused by working on overly long video files.

Finally, entrusting your transcription needs to a reliable transcription website frees up your time, allowing you to focus your efforts on other urgent organizational tasks. Quality online transcription service websites are typically able to avail your transcripts in whatever file format you prefer- including .srt.

• Adding Subtitle/Caption Files to your Videos

Now that you’ve got your caption/subtitle files securely saved on your computer’s hard drive, what next? How do you embed them to the corresponding video files? Well, you have quite a variety of options here, depending on what you intend to use the videos for and where you wish to publish the videos.

For instance, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have incorporated the options to add subtitle files to one’s published videos, from within the platforms themselves. On the other hand, researchers that aren’t looking to publish their confidential research content to blog/social media platforms might have to rely on a variety of downloadable captioning software to embed video caption transcripts into their video files.

Let’s take an in-depth look at each of these video captioning approaches below!

• Captioning on Social Media Platforms (Facebook and Twitter)

By now, most of the globally renowned social media platforms that facilitate video sharing have already incorporated captioning capabilities within their platforms- including Facebook and Twitter. Below is a brief description of how you can embed subtitle/caption files to your video files on these platforms.

Facebook – navigate to the video you want to caption, hover over it to disclose the ‘edit video’ option. Then, on the interface that comes up, click on ‘upload SRT file’ beneath the ‘captions’ tab. Save your file.

Twitter – once logged in, select the video you want to caption from the media studio library. Then, within the dialogue box that pops up, click on ‘subtitles’ and set your preferred language. Finally, click on the ‘upload’ button to add the corresponding subtitle/caption file from your hard drive.

• Adding Captions using a Video Editing Software (VideoProc)

Several video editing software provide additional functionalities that support video captioning. Of these, VideoProc is one of the most popular, as the software seems to be optimized for captioning purposes.

Let’s take a step-by-step look at how you can add captions to your video files using VideoProc!

• Download and install VideoProc on your personal computer.
• Once installed, launch the software application, then navigate to the video processing interface to add the source video file.
• Then, navigate to the editing menu and click on the ‘add subtitle’ button, which will allow you to browse your drive and choose a subtitle file that you’d like to add. Once you’ve previewed your subtitles/captions, you can choose to either hardcode or softcode them into your video file.
• Finally, click ‘run’ to execute your preferences.

Wrap-Up

To create subtitle/caption files for your video content, you can either transcribe the video files yourself or rely on automated transcription tools and human transcription service websites. The last option guarantees you the most accurate video transcripts

After creating your caption files, you then need to embed them to your videos- a process than is facilitated by a variety of video editing tools, as well as by popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.