Written by Captions or subtitles are becoming more and more necessary for videos. If you want to reach deaf, hard-of-hearing viewers or speakers of a different language you’ll have to invest time in curating your captions.
And if you guessed right, it’s never been easier to do. You can do it yourself, pay for a service, or even use an auto-transcription tool.
Remember to meet accessibility standards your captions must include the type of music playing and background noises so the viewer knows exactly what is happening on the screen.
There are a few options for creating captions.
- Automatically transcribe the speech to text
- Import a caption file from a third-party
- Add them manually
At our studio, we work within the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Finally, in 2021, Adobe Premier introduced speech to text. This added an automatic video transcription for the captions workflow. Adobe has an outstanding write up:
Premiere Pro and working with captions.
This tool allows you to capture the captions, edit the text and edit the appearance of how they are displayed on your video.
The default option is the subtitle, this allows you to create nice-looking subtitles that will get burned into the video image or can be exported as a sidecar.
A sidecar is a subtitle type that refers to an uploaded external text file that is delivered to the player as a separate file. Within Premier you can export these caption formats:
- Scenarist Closed Caption File (.scc)
- MacCaption VANC File (.mcc)
- SMPTE Timed Text (.xml)
- EBU N19 Subtitle (.stl)
- SubRip Subtitle Format (.srt)
One of the most popular is .srt, the file type used by YouTube.
What is nice about Premiere speech to text is that you can download additional language packs. As of 2022, there are over 14 languages available.
Keep in mind that with all AI (Automation) you need to double-check the captions. Make sure that all the spelling is correct, especially with names and nouns. And you can even shore up those URLs. And like we mentioned earlier add in the music and sound effects.
As you can see, adding video captions has never been easier. If captions are still giving you headaches, schedule a time to talk with us.