Speaker 1: So, I tried something different in my last video, and the result was, I did something I noticed Mr. B's doing in almost all of his videos. I added burnt in captions to the start of my video, but the way I did it was wrong. I added titles above my timeline, manually typed in the text and adjusted the appearance, then tried to manually time it to the audio in my clip. Turns out, there's a much easier way of doing this. Hey guys, what's up. My name is Serge, and on this channel, I can help you tell a more engaging story by making better videos. Today, we're looking at adding on-screen captions to your video, Mr. B style. So, about a day or two after I finished editing my last video, and wasted way too much time adding just a few burnt in captions, Rene Ritchie tweeted about this, asking if there's a better way. Quite a few people recommended using an app called Captionator for this, so I thought I'd try it out. When I think of it… Where have you been all my life? No, Captionator is a standalone app, not a plugin, but it's designed for use with Final Cut Pro. You can download it right from Apple's App Store, which is good, because you have to grant it quite a few permissions. When you first open Captionator, click the forward arrow, and on the first screen, click the Install XBar Destination button. This is how it links to Final Cut Pro. Click the forward arrow again, and skip through the video tutorials until you get to the last screen. In order to take advantage of all the included caption styles, make sure you have all three of these fonts installed on your computer. You can now close the Captionator window. Next, let's take a look at how we can use this app to add captions or subtitles to our Final Cut Pro project. When your project is complete, and you're ready to add captions, first thing we need to do, in order to get the most accurate results, is disable all audio except for the dialogue. This is really simple. Just open the index window, select Roles, and disable the Music and Sound Effect roles. Hit the Share button, and you should see a new Captionator share destination. Select it, leave the settings as they are, and click Next, to export the audio from your project as an XML file, and load it into Captionator. In the next window, you can either select one of the available presets included for your titles, or if you open the advanced drop down menu, you can customize the text appearance, and make it look exactly the way you want. When you use Captionator to generate captions, you actually get two sets of captions. One set will be added to your project as titles, to be used as burnt in on screen captions, and another set as closed captions, that when you upload your video to a site like YouTube, will allow the viewer to turn these on or off. Both these sets have their own settings. First, let's configure the settings for our burnt in captions, which you'll find in the titles tab. The first set of sliders determines the word count in your titles. So by default, each word you say pops up as a different title clip. But if your dialogue in your video is fairly fast, you can bump these up to see more words at a time. Let's just leave ours for one per title. You can also adjust your title length by a number of characters, using the two sliders in the middle. The duration sliders set the minimum and maximum amount of time your titles stay on screen, and the gap duration slider will fill gaps between your titles during silent parts. So, if you set this to for example 3 seconds, your previous title will stay on screen for up to 3 extra seconds during silent parts to fill any gaps. All these settings are also available for captions. And if you only need one of the two options, so let's say we only want titles, but not captions, what you would do, is in the captions tab, deselect the generate checkbox. For demo purposes, I'm going to export both. Hit the generate button to export your captions as an XML file, and choose a save destination. Next, go to the destination where you saved your XML file, double click to open in Final Cut Pro, and choose the library you want to add this to. Your captions show up as a project in the new Generated Captions event. Double click this project to open it, select all your caption clips, and press Command C to copy them. Go back to your project, make sure your playhead is at the very start, and press Command V to paste your captions. This pastes all your title clips right above your primary timeline. So, if you have b-roll or any other clips connected above it, select all your caption clips, and drag them up to the very top to make them visible at all time. And while you still have all your clips selected, if you want to move them, just use the transform parameter in the video inspector. Let's move ours down to the bottom. Each one of these titles can also be adjusted manually in Final Cut Pro. Just select the clip you want to adjust, go to the titles inspector, and in here, you can add a build in or out animation, change the color, outline, width, or even add a drop shadow. You can fine tune the appearance even more in the text inspector. All that's left to do is turn your music and sound effects back on, and skim through the titles, and correct any mistakes you see. While the transcription here isn't perfect, it's pretty darn good. My name is Serge, and about 15 years ago, I came across one of those old GoPro kiosks at the mall. Now, if you have a brand specific font, or a color you use in all your videos, instead of changing the settings every time, you can make your own style preset. When you use Captionator to caption your next project, in the style tab, make all your adjustments, and when you have your title looking exactly the way you want, hit this little plus button right here. Give it a name, and click save, to save it as your own custom preset. Next time you want to use this style of captions, it'll be on your preset list, ready to use. Captionator is an amazing companion to Final Cut Pro, and if you're interested in more tools you can use to improve Final Cut Pro, I made a video about my top 5 most used plugins. Click here to watch it. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you back here next week.