DLS Tutorials

Subtitles and Captions

Subtitles and captions are great to include in video projects for many reasons, including accessibility. Programs today make adding this feature to your videos relatively easy and convenient. Most programs will also have options for auto-translation tools, or methods of adding your own translations for subtitles / captions. 

Table of Contents

• Auto-generating subtitles or captions
• Subtitles / Captions from a pre-written script
• Manually add subtitles or captions

Auto-generating subtitles or captions

There are several programs that will auto-generate subtitles / captions for you using text recognition, saving you a lot of time and effort. Be sure to check auto-generated text for accuracy and timing if you go this route!

YouTube

YouTube automatically generates captions for videos uploaded to it. These captions aren't great in terms of capitalization and spelling, but they are a good starting place.

• YouTube Help > Use automatic captioning
• YouTube Help > Edit or remove captions

Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro is available on the Digital Learning Studio computers as part of Willamette's access to Adobe Creative Cloud. Premiere Pro will process videos uploaded to your project and generate captions, which you can then download in various formats. Premiere

• Adobe documentation > Speech to Text in Premiere Pro
• Adobe documentation > Working with Captions

Subtitles / Captions from a pre-written script

If you have a written script for your video, you can upload the file to your project and edit timings. 

Add pre-written subtitles / captions to YouTube

• YouTube Help > Add subtitles and captions
• YouTube Help > Supported subtitle and closed caption files
• YouTube Help > Tips for creating a transcript file

Add pre-written subtitles / captions using Premiere Pro

• Adobe documentation > Working with captions
• Adobe documentation > Use a third-party service (import a SRT file into Premiere Pro)

Manually add subtitles or captions

Pretty much every program gives you the option to type subtitles or captions directly into your project. 

• YouTube Help > Add subtitles and captions > Type manually
• Premiere Pro: Adobe documentation > Manually transcribe captions