Video Editing – How to add captions and subtitles
Welcome to the 2nd part of my guest blog article produced by Red Jacket Media on video editing.
In this article, Malik (Founder and Video Producer at Red Jacket Media) provides some useful resources and tips on how to include captions and subtitles in your videos.
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Start with part 1 – The Best Programmes and Apps for Video Editing.
So to begin with there is a difference between captions and subtitles. A caption is something that your audience can see but can’t hear the video; so when it comes to your social media videos such as Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn; those videos don’t play with audio to begin with so what you would be using is actually CAPTIONS.
Subtitles are where your audience can actually hear the video, but can’t understand what they’re listening to. Subtitles are generally used for foreign films.
So let’s assume that what you actually want to do is add captions to your social media videos and that social media platform won’t necessarily play audio as soon as someone scrolls onto your video.
I’m going to begin by warning you, adding captions to an entire video is time-consuming work! You have to scroll across your video and you have to pause and listen to what you said type out what you’ve said and then clip it so it matches the time you took to say what you said.
If you have a bit of time on your hands and basic IT skills, let’s begin…
SubE Android App
I’ve not personally use this App however, I’ve heard good things. SubE is an app developed by a company called raccoon unicorn and is a free app which is quite easy to use. Basically, you can use this App to add or remove captions from a video on your android device.
SubE: Subtitle Editor – Apps on Google Play
Subcake Android App
To give you android users a fighting chance I’m also going to mention an app called Subcake. This app is again quite simple to use. It’s a simple subtitle maker where you can just scroll through your video and add captions where you need to.
Subcake – Add Subtitle to Video, Subtitle Maker – Apps on Google Play
Add Subtitles Apple IOS App
Now let’s move onto an Apple iOS device. My favourite App for iOS has got to be ‘Add Subtitles’ this allows you to create videos with subtitles straight on your device it comes with a fully automatic voice recognition system that can recognise your voice and easily adds subtitles to it. The cool thing about this particular App is that it generates your subtitles automatically while you speak, they match the timestamps perfectly and it just works really really well.
Mixed Captions App
The next App is called mixed captions. This one allows you to basically choose a video and transcribe up to 30 minutes of footage on your device. A cool thing with this App is that you can actually change a lot of your subtitle options like your colour backgrounds and in some cases you can change your font.
PremierePro – Adobe Subscription
Now let’s move onto the hard-core software. I’m gonna be a little bit biased when I mention PremierePro. It’s what I personally use, yes, I pay an Adobe subscription to use it. This has so many different options when it comes to adding captions to a video, Again is a time consuming task, but you have got excellent options. You do have to pay for Adobe, it’s about £20 a month just for premiere pro however I’m a professional and it’s an expense I’m willing to pay.
In premiere pro you do get multiple options whereas you can animate your captions, you can move them around infinitely anywhere you want and can change the font. You can also change the background and colour of the text. Anything you can think of you can do using premiere pro. This has a very steep and endless learning curve. Unless you’re planning to become an editor I would leave it to the Pros.
DaVinci Resolve Software
You also have DaVinci Resolve which is a free software which I’ve mentioned before. It should actually be a premium product going from £800 or a subscription model as it allows you to do everything that premiere pro would do, but it is free to use so it’s an excellent option. I’m always going to say this is a very steep learning curve when it comes to learning how to use DaVinci Resolve. If you are going to use either of these tools, just remember that it is a very time-consuming task even with captions and subtitles, especially if you do not know what you’re doing.
However, I would not be doing my industry any service by not mentioning the fact that you can hire a professional to do your captions and subtitles for you, or take over your video editing. Most of the time leaving certain tasks to professionals will actually save you time and money, leaving you to focus on what you do best.
We hope you’ve found these tips useful and if you would like help with video editing you can find out more on the Red Jacket Media website.
