DLS Tutorials

Subtitles and Captions, Transcription

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

My Media / Kaltura

My Media / Kaltura is a program built into Canvas that you can use for low-level video creation and editing, it also has a feature to auto-generate captions for videos that are uploaded to your My Media gallery or that you create within the program.

• In Canvas, click on the My Media icon in the global (farthest left) menu bar near the bottom of the screen. 

• Create or upload your video.
  • Upload a video by clicking on the Add New drop down menu at the top right of the screen and selecting Media Upload. 

• Give the video time to process; depending on the length of the video, this may take a while.
• Click on the title of the video that you want to download captions from.

• If the video has finished processing, closed captions will be available (click on the small CC icon in the lower right of the video screen). 

• Click on the Actions drop down menu below the video at the right of the screen, and select Edit from the drop down menu.

• Click on the Captions tab in the menu below the video, then click the download icon (which looks like an arrow moving towards a horizontal line). 

• You can now edit open the downloaded captions with a text editing program. 

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