Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to History Fireside videos. In today's video I want to talk about subtitles and how you can easily subtitle your videos and your lectures as quickly as possible or at least as quickly as I've found it. This video is divided into three parts, all timestamps down below so you can skip ahead to the sections that are more relevant to you as quickly as you want to. The first section is going to be me talking about why subtitles are important and the different types of subtitles that you can have and which ones I prefer for various different reasons. And because I want this video to be as accessible as possible to a wide range of people across institutions, what I've also done is divided the video up into two further parts. The second part is going to explore how you can subtitle your videos using software that is freely available online so you don't have to pay anything else for it. But the third part is going to be how I subtitle my videos thanks to a subscription to Adobe Premiere Pro. I'm aware that not every institution has access to Premiere Pro so I wanted to give people the two choices depending on what they've got available. So why are subtitles important? Well, subtitles make your lectures accessible. Without them for some people like myself, I'm a deaf academic, a video without any subtitles is incomprehensible for me. I'm not able to follow it. And there are a whole range of disabled students with hearing loss or a range of other disabilities that make it very hard for them to follow the content of a lecture without subtitles or some form of transcript. To put it another way, if this video didn't have subtitles, this is how it sounds to me. But that's what I would hear without any subtitles, without any form of accessibility. But through subtitles it means that suddenly I'm able to access the material and I'm able to learn from it. And that's true for a range of deaf students and for a range of students with a variety of disabilities. Some with auditory processing issues where reading it really enhances their learning. And there are different types of subtitles that you can have. Closed captions or open captions. Subtitles that are burned into the bottom like I have here, where you can't turn them on and off. Now I prefer that system because it means that I can share the video to a variety of different platforms. Twitter, Facebook, I think Tumblr as well or even Instagram, which allows me to ensure that they are subtitles all the way through. Some platforms are easier to turn subtitles on and off on, and so burning them means that they're always accessible, no matter where they're being shared. But places like YouTube make it very easy and very simple for you to just turn subtitles on and off as you please. So it's really a sort of stylistic choice, but I think burning subtitles on really ensures greater accessibility, regardless of where you share your videos. There are many different types of subtitles that you can use to ensure accessibility. A lot of it depends on preferences or depends on the type of video that you are producing or making. Some people like a heavy black background with white text on top of it to ensure the contrast is there and to make sure that it's visible all the way through the video. I quite like having a very clean white text with a thick black outline to make sure that it is visible on dark or light backgrounds. One thing that you need to be aware of and a mistake that I made quite a few times subtitling my own videos, and a mistake that I still occasionally make, is not checking that the subtitles are clear all the way through and remembering that quality of the video can affect the quality of the subtitles. So a lot of the videos when I'm editing them, and I'm editing them in say HD, the subtitles are very clear. But once you bring the quality down, the subtitles can degrade and become less clear. So it's always worth bearing that in mind. And subtitles I'd like to point out are slightly different from transcripts. And transcripts do have a place, they can be useful, but they can also make people feel a little bit left out, a little bit behind. Transcripts are text that are kept behind and that someone can read either after a lecture, after audio content, or they can read at their own pace while watching a video. But it can sometimes take the person's attention away from the video content itself. Subtitles, captions, allow the person to access the information in real time. And that I think is a key difference between a transcript and a subtitle. A subtitle helps immerse the student and helps immerse anyone really into the content of the lecture. You can also have either open or closed subtitles. That is to say you can have your subtitles, like I do at the bottom here, permanently burned into the video. And that means that no matter where you share the video, you've always got subtitles. You've always got that level of accessibility. I find that really useful because while some platforms make it very easy for you to turn on and off subtitles, some platforms either don't have that option or make it very difficult. So YouTube is great for allowing someone control over that, but Twitter can sometimes be a bit more problematic, I find, when it comes to giving people the choice of on or off. So I much prefer burning them in to ensure that no matter where the videos are shared, they've always got that level of accessibility on them. Regardless of which method you use, one thing I want to say as a word of warning is that you cannot rely on auto-generated subtitles. They are wholly inaccurate and they cannot be trusted. There is a place for using the function on YouTube, I find, as a way of helping you sort out some of the timings, but they are not a replacement for proper accessible subtitles. They are often incredibly inaccurate, very vague and unreadable in places, depending on people's accents. So do not rely on auto-generated captions as a way of making your material accessible because it doesn't make it accessible and it often makes people feel like accessibility has been an afterthought rather than an important part of the lecture. As I said earlier, you cannot rely on auto-generated captions. They are rubbish and they don't make your work accessible. But what auto-generated captions are very good for is to help you set the timings and you can edit them quite heavily to make them accurate. And they also help provide you with an SRT file. And that SRT file can be used to make subtitles optional on your videos or used to embed them. So what you need to do is upload your video onto YouTube like you would any other video. And after a while, YouTube will give you some auto-generated subtitles. And to access them, you want to go to the subtitle option on the left. So you've got a list of options there. If you go to Subtitles, you can then click on the auto-generated subtitles and click on Edit in Classic Studio. You can see straight away there's loads of mistakes, even in just the first couple of seconds because of the auto-generated captions. Now my name has been misspelt. It's misinterpreted me saying predominantly as perdomini, for example. It's mistranslated words such as role for world. But you can go through the auto-generated file and you can make amendments and changes that you feel necessary to improve it. And as I said, you can't rely on auto-generated captions to produce anything accurate, but they are really useful to speed things up by giving you a rough idea of the timings. So you can make all the relevant changes here. It can be quite quick depending on how good you are at typing or how good you are at remembering what you've said. Even quicker if you've got a transcript or a script yourself. Once you've made all the changes that you want to make, obviously it would take a lot longer, you'd have to go through the whole script that I don't do here, but I just wanted to show you how it's done. You publish it. And once you've published it, what you can do is then download the entire file. Once you've published the subtitles, you just need to click on them again from the subtitle panel and it will give you an option in the actions box to download as an SRT file. And that SRT file will give you access to embed the subtitles into your video file and to make your work a lot more accessible. Bear in mind that publishing your subtitles on YouTube does not mean that your video is going to be published unless you've made it open to the public. It will remain unlisted. There's a couple of things you can do once you've got those files. What you can do is to give people the option of turning subtitles on or off themselves. If you make both files, the video file and the SRT file available to students or to anyone who's interested in your video, they can then use that file to turn the subtitles on in whatever video program they use. So I'm just using Windows 10 film and TV app and you can see it's not got any subtitles at the beginning, but if you scroll down to the bottom, there's a little speech bubble. If the video file is in the same folder as the SRT file, it will give you a choice to add the subtitles. And as you can see, it's all working fine. My issue with this technique though is that it relies on students to have an understanding of how this works and not every student has done this before and not every student is comfortable with the software. And as I said, it can be a little bit more awkward if you are sharing the video across multiple learning platforms like Blackboard, Moodle or Owler for example. So what I'm going to show you now is how you can embed it using something called Handbrake. And Handbrake is the best software I've found so far, the easiest software to encode that SRT file into the video file so they cannot be turned off. So we've got the video file here again, there's no subtitles as you can see, but to embed the subtitles, what we need to do is open the file in a piece of software called Handbrake and I'll put a link down below that you can access it. Handbrake is easy to use, it's free as well, so again it won't cost anyone anything and it's quite intuitive and quite simple to use. So what you need to do is open up Handbrake after you've installed it and all you really need to do is open that original video file or drag it into that program. This will load up the video program as you can see here. Again I apologise for the fact you're staring at my face quite so much today. You just need to click on the Subtitle tab and then Import Subtitles. Click on the SRT file we have earlier and then click on Burn In. That will ensure that it is embedded and permanently a part of the video. You also want to make sure down here in Save As and Browse that you're saving it under a new name and that you're saving it in the right folder so you don't lose it later. And finally all you need to do is click on Start Encode at the top and then you just wait because it is quite a lengthy process and then the program will burn the subtitles into your video. So this time now we open it straight away, the subtitles are there and they're there for anyone who opens that video file regardless of whether they've got the SRT file or whatever program they're using. As long as it plays the video the subtitles will appear. Finally if you do have Premiere Pro I just want to show you how I do it and this is how I embed the subtitles into all my videos using Premiere Pro. So I open up the project that I've been working on, the video project that I've been working on to make the video and it's really as easy as dragging the SRT file onto the timeline. So if you're using Premiere Pro it's nice and easy and very very quick. Once you've zoomed in you can double click on the captions and a new box will appear and this box will allow you to edit each line should you so wish and it also allows you to make any changes you want to the subtitles in terms of the colour of the subtitles or in terms of the placement of the subtitles. The box to the left of the T will enable or disable the hard background. The letter T enables you to change the colour of the text which can be very useful if say you've got multiple speakers and you want to differentiate between speaker A or speaker B. It's generally best though I find to keep the font just normal white or black rather than experimenting too much with colour because it can make it hard to read. The T to the right of it gives you the ability to change the outline so it's quite good to have white text, very white text with a black outline which makes it more readable on a range of backgrounds. The grid to the right of the little box, the subtitling box will enable you to change the placement of the subtitles. So if you've got a presentation that has a lot of information at the very bottom of a PowerPoint slide or video you can move the subtitle to be at the top of the document, the top of the video rather than at the bottom. And finally you can also change and edit the individual words and the sentences on Premiere Pro just like you do on YouTube. So you can make any last minute changes or adjustments and if you really want to you can also make every line of the subtitle different. I'm not sure why you would but the option is there. When you've got the subtitles as you want them you just go to file and export and then media and then using whatever your normal video settings are you want to go to the caption box and then you want to make sure it says very clearly burn caption into video and that will permanently embed it into the video file that you export. I really hope that makes sense and that it's quite helpful. As I said, once you have that SRT file from YouTube it's quite easy to use that to either make subtitles optional or to embed them using free software like Handbrake or through your usual process on Premiere Pro. This isn't intended to be a comprehensive explanation of the subtitling software available to you, it's just designed to show you very quickly how you can subtitle your videos as quick as possible using the SRT file you get from YouTube and then using either the free software from Handbrake or Adobe Premiere Pro. So there is my video very quickly on how you can subtitle your materials as much as possible and hopefully in a quick way. If you have any questions please feel free to comment down below. There's going to be a whole range of videos coming up in the future that are going to teach people how to record your lectures, record the audio and the video and how to make them as accessible as possible as well as my videos exploring a range of different historical topics. If this is something that is interesting to you please feel free to subscribe down below and if you've got any comments or questions please just drop down below and I will do my best to respond as quickly as possible.