Videos are the most “trendable” form of media. We consider a good video which consists of 3 main elements: good recording, good sound and good editing. You can find the best resources for good video and sound recording by getting the best equipment and finding best video editors which even lets you edit video online so that you can edit your video from any device. But there is another hidden element which can help you reach an audience you might not know want to watch your video. It is captions or subtitles of the video.

For an effective video, there must be captions or subtitles. Through this, your video becomes accessible to a large fraction of the audience and enhances your ROI. Although adding a caption does come under the general video creation process, it’s actually an additional step to prepare your video for a broader platform. And not just the general audience, with subtitles and captions, your video can reach the deaf or hard-to-hear audiences as well.

When you add captions to your video, the content of your video becomes more clear and precise. And to enable this, there are numerous ways such as customizing before exporting the video, through auto-transcription tools, paying for a service and many others. And that’s what we are discussing in this article. So, let’s get started!        

Why does your video need Captions?

Before getting started with the ways to add captions to your video, let’s brief our knowledge on Captions. So, captions are basically an expression to convey the dialogues and narrations, shown in the video, in a written format. The good things about captions are, it isn’t limited to the dialogues or narration only. Various background noises including barking of dogs, car honking or loud music or crashes; all are also expressed in the captions for a better understanding of the video.

And captions are very easy and quick to create. Usually, the video editors do the captioning work all by themselves and others take the help of paid services or tools. We have discussed the methods to add captions to your videos right below.

Methods to add captions to your videos

Adding Manually

There are methods through which you can add captions to your video manually by going through the audio effects in your video editing platform. For that, Typito is proven very effective and quick.

Just go to the audio effect section and open captions. Then based on the settings, drag it down to the audio track or video track to split it according to your video content. These settings slightly vary as per the platform but you can easily adjust the caption settings as per your video. Adding the captions is very easy and runs smoothly in one go.

Through Youtube

For adding the captions through Youtube. Visit the youtube studio and select the option of Subtitle given in the left menu. Then, choose the video that you want to edit and select your preferred language by clicking the Add language section. Now, under the subtitles option, select ADD. Apart from this, you can add subtitles or captions during the upload process as well.

Adding caption files

You can easily add captions to your videos using various tools as well. For that caption, files are made which contain all the essential details of your video and content.  Follow these steps for better understanding:

• Upload your video to the web, without publishing its URL in order to protect it from piracy.
• Now, with the help of the service’s captioning tool, watch the uploaded video and transcribe it. Now, while typing, the caption will start showing in your video.
• After transcribing, review the caption and alter it as per your preference. Make sure the caption is precise and convey the exact message shown in the video.
• Now, download the caption file in a suitable format on your device.
• The caption file format depends on the manner in which your video is uploaded.
• Make sure you host the video in the right format and location. And then, complete your video by adding the caption file and adjusting it according to your video.

Adding captions to video files

With captions, your video becomes more accessible and available for a large fraction of the audience. Captions become a basic element for a video when taking it to a broader platform. And that’s why caption files are considered very effective in your video files. There are generally two major types of caption files, which are:

1. Caption File: Caption files are basically the text files containing all the essential information related to the video content structured according to the timing of action and video.
2. Transcript file: The transcript file only carries the text file of the caption. That’s why when you add a transcript file in your video, it requires additional work and alterations and the work of the video editing platform becomes hectic as it has to moderate the caption according to the video and match the timing.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can say that the captions or subtitles, both work as the written expression of the video in order to reach a large audience base. It mainly works by showing all the dialogues, narrations and background music or sound effects running in the video, through a written format. This way a large proportion of the audience gets to see your video and understand it better.