In this video I'm gonna show you how you can easily
add captions to your videos.
Hi I'm Andy from TechSmith.
Creating captions for your videos has never been easier.
Today I'm gonna cover five of the simplest ways that you can
add captions to your videos.
Number one: the most obvious way involves the platform we're on right now.
Once you're inside YouTube' studio
editor you can go to the subtitles panel and choose to
add new subtitles or closed captions.
We've already added two different languages for this one,
and now we want to add our English subtitles.
I can either search it here in language search bar,
or choose from the one in the drop down.
This bottom option allows you to see YouTube's
auto-transcription and even jump in and edit what they've already done.
The middle one allows you to type along
as your subject speaks, manually entering your captions.
And this top option is for
uploading a SRT or subtitle file.
If you've already created one like I have click here.
I'll show you how to make these in the next step.
so I click upload a file,
choose my file,
click upload, but before I do that you can see in
the background they've auto transcribed my subtitles and they're
usually pretty close but we're gonna replace
those by uploading our own just to make sure they're accurate.
And if I wish to edit it I can go through and click on
any one of them to make changes.
But this is good so I'm going to hit publish, and it's that simple.
If you choose to use their auto
transcription it's very simple to go in and
make any edits you need to after it's finished.
Number two and three:
since we at TechSmith are the makers of the screen
recording video editing software Camtasia
(link in the description below for a free trial)
both the second and third equally awesome ways
to create captions are inside our software.
Inside Camtasia, using the same video as an example, you can add captions by going under
the audio effects, which for me is under the more
button here then audio effects
and captions click it and drag it
down to your audio track which is also my video
track in this case and it automatically shows you
the waveform and splits the captions into four
second increments right here.
Those are completely adjustable so if you want to make this one go
towards the end of this clip done and so
on the way to get these captions typed
in is as easy as clicking the first one and
just start transcribing.
How do you
extract the text from an image
okay I'll stop there and say well the word image was somewhere
close to about here
moved by next clip and so on and you do
this as you go through the entire video clicking
on each caption that you want to add another
nice option about this is maybe you're not the fastest
typer and you want to be able to try and keep up with what your
speaker saying but it just goes by too fast so
you click the caption you want to hear and this
play button that has the looping arrows will play the
selected clip continuously until you're able to get
the caption written down. As you do that you go
through all of your captions adjusting for the right
duration so that we don't have too long of a
caption on screen at any one given time and
so it makes sense where the caption breaks are.
The other thing is because this video was going on
YouTube I knew I wanted to have twenty seconds of
silence at the end just a little bit of music maybe
so the video would keep playing with end
cards well I don't need captions over that so I'm
gonna right click and say merge with next
caption and again merge with next caption
over and over until I get the last one
and there now we have a blank caption for the last few
seconds and just that easy we made our
captions in Camtasia
when we're done you can go to share
export captions and when we do that it brings up
the window for you to save them and it's good practice to
name it the same as your video so for us it's
episode one extract text I can even
click right here on this one episode one
and that way it'll be the same name then it
saves right where I tell it to one quick note
subtitles and captions are not the same
thing they're close so they're often
confused captions usually
include visual descriptions of sound happening in your
video cars honking dogs barking
where as subtitles are just straight transcription of your
words and often referring to the translation
of multiple languages as well the second way that I
like to add captions inside Camtasia is
only available in windows if you're a mac
user hang in there for a minute but you windows users are going to love this.
Over hear in Camtasia's side
tab, see we have a video down there in the
player, just go to more, then
captions, this brings up this big open window
on the left and you can either import your script if it's
already written out, or click add captions.
And I'm going to do that, and it adds this one
caption and I'm gonna stretch it the entire
length of my video though actually you can see this one was
also given twenty seconds of quiet music at the end for
YouTube so I'll just stretch it as far as the audio
goes then I'm going to click in here and I've
already copied it from my document I'm just going to
paste it right into this window
and there's my whole script and you can see on the left
hand side here as well
one quick note is that up at the top you'll see
this space occurred and we want to get rid of that
spacing matters in subtitle files and so we
need to get rid of that so I'm just gonna take this top line
and just backspace or delete and get us to the
top. Now we're gonna go to modify
captions and we're gonna choose 'sync
captions' and what this will do is allow the
video to play as we tell it what words she's
saying so we hit sync captions
so I'm gonna hit continue and it's going to
start playing and as it does
I can say right now she's at this
point hi is the next word
she says that word
you just keep clicking as it happens and she says
"so" and you just keep going until you're done.
"this" If you need to pause for any
reason you pause, if you're ready to
stop and you're done you hit stop
and you'll see the captions are being created right down here
below if you've already gotten your script written
down this is a great method and saves a ton of time.
Number four:
many of you may not have heard of this next one, but
TechSmith's newest video platform Knowmia
(I put a free trial in the description for Knowmia as well)
has an amazing and super
simple speech to text option
so here's Knowmia one of TechSmith's newest
platforms. If I go down to the
details inside of my videos one of the options
down here in the tabs is accessibility.
Under accessibility we'll find our captions and
right now we have no caption tracks so I'm gonna add one.
And right here the first option is 'speech to
text' automatically generate captions for this video
I click apply and while we
may have to wait a bit it's going to start transcribing them
for us automatically, and the great thing is you're
gonna get an email when you're transcribing his finished. So you
don't have to sit around and wait for it. All right I've just received
the email saying my captions are now created and here they are.
It says ready to edit so I'm gonna
go ahead and click the three dots and jump and to edit them,
and then you can go through take a look at them and just make
sure that all the captions turned up correctly.
Does it look okay? Are things spelled
right? Did we get her name correct?
Yes we did, and we just keep going until you
find any spelling or grammar errors
at your own leisure.
When you're done click publish.
And that's it!
Now when people play back this video they can choose
the option to have closed captions
on or off.
Side note when you upload your captions to
Knowmia your viewers can search your video
captions to find sections most pertinent to what
they want to learn. That's good for SEO
too. Number five: When you have a
lot of captions to do and don't want to do all the heavy
lifting of adding all those captions
it's probably worth paying a website like
Rev.com or others to do the work for you.
Just think of the benefits adding captions to your
videos is gonna yield for both you and
your audience. Have you used captions
before? What's your favorite workflow for
creating them? Do you write them longhand or have them
automatically transcribed? Tell us in the comments
below we want to know. And remember if
you enjoyed this video give it a like! And subscribe
to our channel for more great content.
Thanks for watching!