So I tried something different in my last video.
And the result was…
I did something I notice Mr. Beast doing
in almost all of his videos.
I added burned in captions to the start of my video.
But the way I did it was wrong.
I added titles above my timeline,
manually typed in the text and adjusted the appearance,
then tried to manually time it to the audio in my clip.
Turns out there’s a much easier way of doing this….
Hey guys, what’s up.
My name is Serge, and on this channel
we try and help you tell a more engaging story
by making better videos.
Today, we’re looking at adding on screen captions to your video,
Mr. Beast style.
So about a day or two after I finished editing my last video,
and wasted way too much time adding just a few burned in captions,
Rene Ritchie tweeted about this, asking if there’s a better way.
Quite a few people recommended using an App called Captionator for this,
so I thought I’d try it out.
What do I think of it?
Where have you been all my life.
Now, Captionator is a standalone app, not a plugin,
but it’s designed for use with Final Cut Pro.
You can download it right from Apple’s App store,
which is good, because you have to grant it quite a few permissions.
When you first open Captionator, click the forward arrow,
and on the first screen, click the Install Export Destination button.
This is how it links to Final Cut Pro.
Click the forward arrow again,
and skim through the tutorial videos until you get to the last screen.
In order to take advantage of all the included caption styles,
make sure you have all these fonts installed on your computer.
You can now close this Captionator window.
Next, let’s take a look at how we can use this app
to add captions or subtitle to our Final Cut Pro project.
When your project is complete, and you’re ready to add captions,
first thing you need to do in order to get the most accurate results,
is disable all audio except for the dialogue.
This is really simple.
Just open the Index window,
select Roles,
and disable the Music and Sound Effects roles.
Hit the Share button,
and you should see a new Captionator share destination.
Select it, leave the settings as they are,
and click Next to export the audio from your project
as an XML file and load it into Captionator.
In the next window,
you can either select one of the available presets included for your titles,
or if you open the Advanced drop-down menu,
you can customize the text appearance
and make it exactly the way you want.
When you use Captionator to generate captions,
you actually get two sets of captions.
Once set will be added to your project as titles
to be used as burned in on-screen captions,
and another set as closed captions,
that when you upload your video to a site like YouTube,
will allow the viewer to turn these on or off.
Both sets have their own settings.
First, let’s configure the settings for our burned in captions,
which you’ll find in the titles tab.
The first set of sliders determines the word count in your titles,
so by default, each word you say pops up as a different title clip,
but if the dialogue in your video is fairly fast,
you can bump these up to see more words at a time.
Let’s just leave ours for one per title.
You can also adjust you title length by the number of characters
using the two sliders in the middle.
The duration sliders set the minimum and maximum
amount of time your titles stay on screen,
and the gap duration slider will fill the gaps
between your titles during silent parts.
So, if you set this to, for example, three seconds,
your previous title will stay on screen for up to three extra seconds
during silent parts to fill any gaps.
All these settings are also available for captions.
And, if you only need one of the two options,
so, let’s say we only want titles, but not captions,
what you would do, is in the captions tab,
and de-select the generate checkbox.
For demo purposes, I’m going to export both.
Hit the generate button to export your captions as an XML file,
and choose a save destination.
Next, go to the destination where you saved your XML file,
double click to open it in Final Cut Pro,
and choose the library you want to add this to.
Your captions show up as a project in a new Generated Captions event.
Double click this project to open it,
select all you caption clips,
and press Command C to copy them.
Go back to your project,
make sure your playhead is at the very start,
and press Command V to paste your captions.
This pastes all your title clips right above your primary timeline,
so if you have B-Roll or other clips connected above it,
select all your caption clips,
and drag them to the very top to make them visible at all time.
And, while you still have all your clips selected,
if you want to move them,
just use the transform parameter in the video inspector.
Let’s bring ours down to the bottom of the screen.
Each one of these titles can also be adjusted manually in Final Cut Pro.
Just select the clip you want to adjust,
go to the titles inspector, and in here,
you can add a build in or out animation,
change the color, outline width or even add a drop shadow.
You can fine tune the appearance even more in the text inspector.
All that’s left to do, is turn your music and sound effects back on,
and skim through the titles and correct any mistakes you see.
While the transcription here isn’t perfect, it’s pretty damn good.
My name is Serge,
and about 15 years ago,
I came across one of those old GoPro kiosks
at the mall.
Now, if you have a brand specific font or color
you use in all your videos,
instead of changing settings every time,
you can make your own style preset.
When you use Captionator to caption your next project,
in the Style tab,
make all your adjustments,
and when you have your title looking exactly the way you want,
hit this little plus button right here.
Give it a name,
and click save to save it as your own custom preset.
Next time you want to use this style of captions,
it’ll be on your preset list, ready to use.
Captionator is an amazing companion for Final Cut Pro.
And, if you’re interested in more tools
you can use to improve Final Cut Pro,
I made a video about my Top 5 most used plug-ins.
Click here to watch it.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you back here next week.