Speaker 1: This video is all about captions, subtitles, and more. There's pretty much everything in here, including the different formats, software you can use, adding color and positioning, and fancy roll-up captions that come on the screen. Timestamps will be in the description, along with the YouTube chapters thing. Also, you might want to turn on your captions while you watch this, because I might have some examples. So first, what are captions and subtitling? They are basically an overlay on your video with a text transcript of sorts. There's actually a difference between captions and subtitles. Subtitles are for people who can hear the audio, but might not understand the language. So if you're trying to learn a new language, this is great. And captions are for people who cannot hear the audio. There are also two types of captions, open and closed. Closed captions, usually indicated with a CC icon, are the kind that the viewer can choose to turn on. Open captions are the kind that are part of the video and cannot be removed by the viewer. I'll most likely refer to all of these as captions in this video. So, why caption videos in the first place? The main reason is for accessibility. If someone cannot hear, captions can really help. If there are no subtitles, they might not even watch the content. Movies and most TV shows are actually required to provide captioning. Another reason is for convenience. Imagine you were sitting on a bus and you forgot your headphones. You can still watch the video if you turn on the captions. On YouTube, there are a lot of people who caption their videos, which help the videos reach a broader audience, and it's just generally nice to have. Tom Scott is one example, in this video about the world's copyright system. It's a really great video, and they caption the entire 40-minute video. There's this one segment that has a great example of positioning and colors. You can see the different people have the captions in their own color and is positioned to where they are on the screen. Oh, I'm sorry, I had no idea. We bought that license in good faith from a third party. We should both talk to them. At which point the third company's lawyers would get a very worrying phone call. Ah. This makes it so much easier to read the captions and know what is coming from who. Before we get into captioning, I want to talk about how captions should be made. The FCC publishes standards for captioning, but that is kind of difficult to follow. There are some basic things to keep in mind. The captions should be accurate, preserve the original meaning of what someone is saying, and have consistent styling and timing. And it should identify who is speaking. You can do this through adding color or positioning the captions over the person talking, or even just adding like an arrow or a line for the new speaker talks. So what's the first step to captioning? Getting the software. There are tons of different applications and websites that do many other things and range from free to over $9,000. Some enterprise software costs that much. There's some editing software that has captioning tools built in like Adobe Premiere Pro, but I'll be going over what I found works best. So the software that I found works best is this free open source one called Subtitle Edit. The layout is actually pretty easy to get a hang of. If you open it up, the first thing you do is choose the format. Now I'll be going over the formats later in the video, but if you want to follow along, you can just leave it at whatever it comes with by default. Then you'll want to add a video or audio that you want to caption. This will allow you to see or hear what you are captioning, which makes it so much easier. To add the captions, you can click and drag on the audio waveform area. This is great because it's an easy way to choose when the caption starts and stops. Then you can start adding the captions. Once you get it captioned, you can add some formatting. Changing the color is easy. You can right click on the line you want to add color to and select color. Then you can choose from the presets or even make your own custom one. It will end up looking something like this. You can also choose alignment from a 3x3 grid by right clicking on the line that you want to align and then choose an option where you want it to be. Here's what that will look like. For basic text formatting, you can right click on the line you want and choose from bold, italic, or underline. Here's an example of all of those. This one's a little interesting and it doesn't really work all the time, but you can choose a font face. You just right click on the line and choose font name. It gives you a list of fonts to choose from. And I could put bold rainbow comic sans in the middle of the screen. So exporting the caption file is the last part of that and you press ctrl s on your keyboard or go to file, save, or file, export. Okay, so what are the caption formats? There are tons of them, but the main ones that I'll be talking about is SRT or SubRip, WebVTT, STL, and SCC. Regardless of the format that you choose, the software kind of works the same. Here's a table to show the features that each format support. SRT, STL, and SCC all support positioning and VTT has limited positioning support. I'll go more in depth later. SRT, VTT, and STL all support formatting like italic, bold, and underline. SCC supports italics and underline, but not bold text. So it's a little limited. You can change the font face on SRT and VTT, but not the others. Color is supported by SRT, VTT, and SCC, and STL has a limited color range. Roll up or paint on, which I'll talk more about in a bit, is only supported by SCC. Now about the individual features. Positioning is the one that all of them support. You can choose where to put it from a 3x3 grid, except WebVTT only allows the top, middle, and bottom. This is a great feature because you can move the text so it's not in the way of other things. Also, if there are two people, you can position the subtitle on the person who is speaking. A lot of TV shows use this. SCC has almost full support for basic text formatting, including italic and underline. SRT, VTT, and STL all have support for basic text formatting. I can make bold italic and underline. You would mostly want this for emphasis. Italics are used for voiceovers or for people who are not on the screen. If you have someone that pans off the screen and is behind the camera, you would want to turn their subtitles into italics. Color is another feature that is fully supported by SRT, VTT, and SCC. You can choose from any number of colors. STL only has support for 8 colors. This is something that can be used for multiple people. If you have an interview between people, you can have one person have white text and another have yellow. This is a great way to easily distinguish between multiple people, but sometimes can be hard to read if you choose a really dark color. By the way, you can see examples of a lot of these in the description below. This is one of the features that I think is really cool. There's many names for it. Roll up, paint on, scroll up, but they all do the same. The captions come onto the screen one character at a time. Kind of like they're animated. Then when the next caption comes on the screen, the last one gets pushed up and a new one appears. What's great about this is if you have fast moving text, like if someone's talking fast, the captions stay on the screen longer. This is mostly used on live TV broadcasts, but you can still use it for pre-recorded video. For some reason, I really like the look of these captions. You can even choose between having two lines roll up or three. SCC is the only format that supports roll up, and for that we'll have to look at how SCC files work. The reason we'll have to look at the file instead of using the software is because the software doesn't actually support roll up captions. I've opened issues on their github and tried to get them to add the feature, but I've had no luck. So we're gonna have to open the file in a text editor. This might look a little complicated, but I'll explain it. At the top, you can see the type of captions. SCC stands for Scenarist Closed Captions. Then there's a space between lines, and here's the first caption. It starts with a timecode, which is the start of the caption. So 9-4-A-E clears all of the captions on the screen, so there's not a bunch of them stacking up at once. Then 9-4-2-0 starts a pop-on caption. This isn't the one that rolls on the screen or is a paint on or whatever. This is just the standard one that appears. 9-4-7-6 is the positioning and color information. In this case, that's row 15, column 12 with white text. I know that's also a little complicated, but on this positioning chart, you can see that it's near the bottom and in the middle. The rest of this is the actual caption until the end. 9-2-4-F indicates the end of the caption. By the way, I found a great website that has all this information. If you go to the website, you can use the search function of your browser, probably Ctrl-F, to look up the codes. Now on to making these captions roll up on the screen. Look for the Find and Replace function on your software. Most of the time, you can just press Ctrl and H. Then you'll want to find 9-4-A-E, 9-4-A-E, 9-4-2-0, 9-4-2-0. This is the stuff for a pop-on caption, but we don't want that. If you want the two-line roll-up captions, replace that with 9-4-A-D, 9-4-2-5, and 9-4-A-D, 9-4-2-6 if you want three-line. I'll leave a little note in the description about all this. The next thing you need to do is to remove 9-4-2-F, 9-4-2-F from the end of the caption. This clears the caption, but we don't want that for the roll-up captions. You can replace it with nothing, and it'll basically delete it for you. Now you can save it, and the captions roll onto the screen instead of popping on. See the difference? If you want to see an example of SCC, check the description below. Now, here's some miscellaneous stuff about captions. I couldn't really fit it into the video, but wanted to say it anyway. Verbatim captions are the kind that have every single word or sound listed out. If there's a bird chirping, it'll be included. Usually, you wouldn't want to add that in, but it allows you to fully capture emotion or whatever and is a true transcript of the video. There are a lot of good captioning services that can caption for you. This is not sponsored, but I've had experience with Rev, and I've heard others using Caption Plus. This makes it so much easier for you. You can actually have more than one caption on screen at a time. It's a little janky, but in the software, you can set the start time of both captions to overlap. This is nice if you have multiple people talking at once. The subtitle edit software has a feature where you can actually work with multiple people on the same caption file over the network. I don't know how well it works, but it's there and it's pretty cool. You might be wondering why I like captions so much. I was watching videos from Technology Connections and Tom Scott on why captions are so important. I was interested in it, but didn't really think about adding it to my videos. Then I watched a Tom Scott video, and at the very end, there is an outtake where the person holding the camera falls back a little. Tom's captions were in white text, but then the person holding the camera suddenly switched to yellow text. For some reason, I thought that was really cool, so I started to try and figure out how to do captions in colors. I spent a long time researching captions and found there wasn't a lot of videos rounding up everything about captions in one place. At least recent ones. This video was a long time in the making. I hope you found this helpful, and maybe you'll even consider captioning. That's about it for this video. Thank you for watching.