Many videographers neglect to include closed captioning in their videos.
However, captions will not only help people who are deaf or hard of hearing, they will
also help you reach a larger audience, for example, people who don't speak your language.
I'll come back to the "why" a bit later. For now, let's tackle the "how".
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Let's begin by taking a look at what we're talking about.
Here is one of my videos. If I click on the closed captioning button - that's the button
with the letters cc-the captions then appear in the player window. These captions reflect
the audio-what I'm saying, for example, in this video.
Adding captions to your videos is really easy. If you can use a word processing program,
you can add captions to your videos.
So how do you get captions attached to your video?
First, you must upload your video to a media-sharing site.
I'm going to use YouTube to illustrate since that is where my videos are posted and because
YouTube has added technology that makes this all very easy.
First, open your Video Manager. You will see all of your videos.
Open the drop-down menu next to edit on the one you want to adjust and select "Subtitles
and CC".
This action opens the Subtitle and Closed Captions Manager. On the left, you see your
video in a player window.
On the right, you see another drop-down menu with the choice of selecting English or another
language.
You must set the language before you can add captions or subtitles.
I've already selected English since that is the language used in my video.
YouTube will automatically create a closed caption file using voice recognition software
to transcribe the words spoken in the video.
Let's take a look at this auto-transcript. You can see the speech in the video as text
in the transcript listed on the right.
Now, this works pretty well, but doesn't transcribe everything perfectly, as you can see.
At this point, you have two choices. You can go through this automatically transcribed file and make
corrections.
Or, you can upload a previously prepared transcript file. That is what I did for this video, which
I'll come back to in a moment.
If you don't have a word-for-word transcript for your video, it will be easier to go through
the automatic transcript and make corrections.
To do this, tap the "edit" button at the bottom of the transcript. Now you can insert your
cursor into each box of text to make changes. Like this.
Notice that the caption appears in the video and shows the changes as you make them. This
automatic transcription does not include punctuation, so you may need to fix that as well.
Let's play it.
[background voice]
So you just play a bit and then make any corrections to the text.
Continue on until you reach the end of the transcript.
When finished, click the Publish Edits button.
If you have been working from a script and already have a text file, then it will be
easier and faster to upload that text file to replace the auto-transcript.
So let's look at how to prepare that text file.
YouTube lists preferred file formats, but the simplest way is to type out your text
and save it as a plain text file.
That is, with a dot txt extension.
You can also use native programs such as TextEdit or Notepad to prepare that file.
You want to format your text to minimize the need for corrections later.
See this example.
First, type out each caption separately.
Second, use a blank line to force the start of a new caption.
Use square brackets to identify background sounds such as music.
And finally, add a double "greater than" symbol to designate a change of speaker.
Now let's upload the transcript for that video.
Here's the text file I've typed using Word.
I'm going to name it and then save it as a plain text file.
So I've named it and now I'm going to go down and select plain text.
And click Save.
Ok. Now I'll go to YouTube and the Captions Manager Page for that video and click on add
new subtitles or captions.
And you're supposed to select your language, and I've selected English.
Then you're asked to discard previously published captions. Which I'll do.
Several options appear. Transcribe, create new, buy a translation, but we're going to
upload a file.
So select that.
And then we're asked to select transcript or subtitles. We'll select transcript.
And now we'll go locate the file in the file manager.
And there it is.
And we'll upload it.
At this point, you have the opportunity to make a final check by playing the video and
making corrections to the uploaded text.
[background voice]
Once the transcript is ready, you want to click the set timings button.
YouTube will then attempt to match up the transcript with the audio.
This may take a few minutes.
Check to see if it's done by clicking the settings timing.
If it is you'll see your captions alongside the timing.
And here we see it.
Now you want to play the audio and check the text timings and make any additional corrections.
There will be places where the program could not translate something and there will appear
a question mark.
You'll need to go through and make those corrections wherever there is a question mark.
Here's one.
And we'll correct it.
Apostrophes for some reason don't translate well.
Here are some more.
Here's an apostrophe.
You may also need to adjust the timings.
For example, if the caption runs over into another frame without audio.
As in this example.
[background voice]
You can adjust that by dragging the tabs at the end of the caption box.
[background voice]
Now the caption cuts off sooner when it plays.
When finished making those fine adjustments, you are ready to publish the captions.
So I'll click publish. Now the captions are going to appear in the video whenever anyone
turns on the closed captioning.
Well that's a quick look at how to add captions to a video.
Let's quickly review why you want to have captions.
If you post your videos on a media-sharing site such as YouTube, your potential audience
is the entire globe.
I've already mentioned that captions can increase your global audience, helping people who don't
speak your language.
For example, about half of the viewers of my videos reside in countries where English
is not the primary language.
A viewer may be able to understand your language better when it's written than when it's spoken.
Another reason to include captions or subtitles in your videos is that YouTube has the option
to auto-translate the transcript into another language.
Let's look at how that works.
A viewer can turn on closed captioning and then open the settings menu.
Select subtitles and closed captioning. Then auto translate. A drop down menu of languages
appears.
And I'm going to pick Chinese.
Now the captions appear in Chinese characters, which is pretty amazing.
So people who do not speak your language at all can still watch and understand your video.
So, if you don' t include a transcript when you upload your video, you are basically losing
part of your potential audience.
A final reason is to optimize your video for search engines.
By providing a text transcript, you give Google and YouTube information to more efficiently
index your video, making it more discoverable by search engines.
Well that's about it. I hope you found this tutorial helpful.
For more tips and tutorials, please check out my iBook, which is available in the iTunes
Store and readable on the iPad, iPhone, and Mac.
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