Hey everybody! It's Premiere Gal here.
Today I'm going to be talking to you
about how to stylize and format your
captions. And a few months ago I created
a video tutorial on how to create open
captions in Premiere Pro and it it's a
quite popular video on my channel
because it's a new feature in Premiere
Pro. And so in this video I'm going to go
into more detail on some of the
standards and how people have formatted
what people say on screen so you can
best make your videos accessible
especially to persons who are deaf or
hard of hearing or people that are
watching videos with without the sound on.
So first to clarify you know what's the
difference between closed captions, open
captions and subtitles?
So closed captions are specifically designed for
persons who are deaf or hearing-impaired
and they describe everything that you
hear so that includes dialogue music and
sound effects and any other type of
non-speech identification in the
soundtrack and another huge feature
about closed captions is that you can
turn it off right so if you're watching
this on youtube you'll see a CC button
in the lower right hand corner and you
can turn the captions on or off now open
captions are the same as closed captions
but you can't turn them off
that's the only difference they are
literally burned into the video like I
showed you in my tutorial on open
captions. Now subtitles this is the most
confusing one for people. You know what
is the difference between captions and
subtitles? Well, the best way for me to
describe it is that subtitles are just
the dialogue translation or the
transcription so it's still text on the
screen and you can still turn subtitles
on or off but let's say you're watching
a foreign film and you are not a French
speaker and the movie is French and you
want to know what what dialogue they're
saying. So you would turn on the English
subtitles right so you can understand
and what they're saying. You are still a
hearing person you can still hear the
other sounds going on in the video but
since you don't understand the language
you need the English subtitles right so
that's the difference between closed
captions, open captions and subtitles.
So now onto how to stylize and format these
captions. The first thing I want to talk
about is the placement so it's very
obvious that in YouTube the common
placement is here in the bottom center
one thing to be mindful of is your lower
thirds, the titles over here where you're
going to introduce somebody in their
title
sometimes they can interfere with the
closed captions and coverup what's on
screen so you need to be mindful of
where the placement is and so now when I
do video editing I tend to actually
bring up my lower third so technically
they're no longer lower thirds they are more
like center placeholders I don't know
what we would call them now I think
we're still going to call them lower
thirds but they're not going to be in
the lower third. I think we're changing
and bringing them up so they don't
interfere with captions. Now we are in
this day and age given more opportunities to
play around with the creativity and in
the style of the funds they don't always
have to be in the bottom center as you
see on facebook now open captions are
quite popular when you play a video
the sound is not on, right? So a lot of
times they'll see videos where the sort
of what person somebody saying is up
here and I think that's fine as long as
people can see it and read it. So
this brings me onto color and font, right?
So if the background is light and you use
the light font it's probably going to be
hard to read so I would definitely
suggest looking at this contrast checker
that I have I'm going to put a link
below so you can check to make sure that
there's enough contrast between the font
color and the background. Now with font
it's really it's really up to you what
you decide and sometimes I recommend
sticking with the same font that you
use in your brand on your website so it
remains consistent in your videos but
you know typically people use for
captions on video sans-serif fonts
and sans-serif fonts are our fonts that
do not have serifs and serifs are like
little details on the end of the
character so if you have the letter A in
a serif font you'll have like this
little lines to the bottom of the A
like a little added detail kind of like
a little foot at the end of the "A" leg.
And so examples of those type of
font like Times New Roman and Garamond
because they're extra stylizing a little
bit thinner and harder to read on screen
so they recommend using sans-serif fonts
which literally means like without serif
and this these fonts are like Helvetica
Arial and like Tahoma a lot of these
fonts are actually your standard for
email and Google docs. You'll notice
those are a lot of the choices because
they are easy to read and understand so
you know there's lots of new modern
fonts out there a lot of designers are
our bearing this in mind when they're
when they're trying to decide you know
how people use this and so there are
heaps of fonts that you can use that are
sans-serif and they're they're pretty
modern contemporary and so now moving on
to how to stylize and format your
non-speech information so this includes
speaker identification identifying you
know who the speaker is let's say I'm
not on screen right so you don't see me
yet and you just see my logo or like my
music you have to introduce me
so in closed captions you have to put in
brackets in all caps [PREMIERE GAL] and
then what I say so If I say, "Hey Everybody!"
you would have brackets [PREMIERE GAL] and then
Hey everybody! And another non-speech
sound is sound effects. So let's say
there's thunder that you don't see on
screen so you'd have to put in brackets
all lowercase
[thunder rumbling]. The same applies for
like honking of a car things that as
hearing people we would we take for
granted because we hear that
and so the thing is is that you don't
want to have to do that to every sound
effect right because that's a lot. But if
that sound is contributing to the story
of your video, caption it! Because how
would you feel if you're watching
something and you
missed out on something because you
couldn't hear it. So that's one thing to
bear in mind when you are creating
captions try to think about what's not
effects add to the story and add to the
plot and are essential story elements
And then the next one is music, right? So
if you know the name of your song and
it's important to the viewer so if you
have the song, "My heart will go on" by
Celine Dion. You could put in brackets
[Celine Dion sings "My heart will go on"]
Right?And then if
the lyrics are there and they're
important to the story as I mentioned
before you can put a ♪ and
then the first line of lyrics and then a ♪
So these are just a few of
the tips and tricks I have that can best
make your videos more accessible to
everyone and just some standards what
has been done out there so I really hope
that you have found this useful and give
it a big thumbs up and please do leave a
comment if you have any questions and I
look forward to hearing your feedback!
Talk soon, bye!
[upbeat electronic music]