Speaker 1: Why should you add closed captioning or subtitles to your social media videos, and how do you actually do it? We're going to answer that right now. First up, why? Why would you add closed captioning? Hopefully I don't need to take very long to sell you on this. We're in the age of mobile, and wherever you are, most likely you don't want to hear the video as you're scrolling through your feed, and having closed captioning immediately grabs your viewers' attention and say, wow, this video is actually kind of interesting. Let me continue watching and reading along with them, and then they may or may not actually then click on the sound to hear the full experience. So having video on social almost basically requires closed captioning, along with SEO benefits, meaning allowing the search engines to know what's actually in your video is a big benefit. Now, there's two styles. One is the native. Both YouTube and Facebook have the ability where closed captioning you can turn on and off, or another version is called a hard-embedded, meaning it's not actually the choice by Facebook or YouTube. You put it into the video file when you're doing your editing in whether Premiere or Final Cut, and you hard-embed it into it, so it's always on and always engaging, and that actually works really well because then people can't turn it off, and they're just pulled in. Now, with social being generally not vertical video, people aren't usually turning their phone sideways. They turn it upright, and you create a video more Instagram-style, which is a square 4x3 or the full length of your phone. It gives you room. You keep your video. You record it like this video, which is 16x9 widescreen, and you put it in the middle, and then you have the subtitles going beneath it, so you don't actually have to cover up any of your video. So it keeps people engaged, but they still can see the entire experience. So it works really well for social, whether hard-embedded or the native file. So now, how do you go about actually getting the closed captioning or subtitle into your video? There's actually a closed captioning file called SRT.SRT, and that's the most common one that's used online, and you can actually create it in many different ways. There's free ways and paid ways, of course. The free and simplest way is YouTube. They actually allow you to create and download SRT files fairly very easily. They have an automatic captioning tool where you just upload your video, and it'll try to figure out what you're saying and create an SRT file off of that. And you can actually go in and change it, modify it, and fix it, because it's about 60% to 80% right, usually more on the 60% right. And they're getting better. But the other way, which is really cool that YouTube offers, is if you read a script word for word, and you have that file, those word for word files, you copy that text, put it into YouTube, into this other area, click sync, and it'll figure out when you said that word, line everything up nicely, and provide you an SRT file. And then you can download it from YouTube and then use that on Facebook or wherever else. So it's not just on YouTube that you can utilize it. So that's really, really handy. Now, if you don't, if you didn't have a word for word script, it was more lecture style like this one, you had just bullet points, or you did an interview, and you didn't manually write it out. There's a couple tools to transcribe it for free, actually, IBM Watson, I came across this recently, and it's kind of old, they have a little tool online, a demo that you can upload an audio file, and it'll transcribe it automatically. Another tool out there that I just came across, I think it's pretty cool. It's an app called Otter. And it's usually meant for transcribing meeting notes. So then you can go back and read it, which is pretty cool in itself. But you can then grab that text file that automatically transcribes, put it back into YouTube and have it automatically synced. Now both IBM and Otter, you'll probably still want to go through and make sure it's accurate. But it's a free way to maybe especially if it's a longer video that you've got, that you want to create that subtitle file, and you don't have to do it manually going through and typing every single word. Now, another free tool is Facebook ads. If you're actually doing a video ad, an option they offer is to create automatic closed captioning and have them review it for accuracy, which is great. The only downside, as far as I believe, you can't download that SRT file from Facebook and use it anywhere else. So if you're only going to put it on Facebook, then there's a free way to get your closed captioning. Well, free. You technically have to still pay Facebook for the ad, but you get the point. Now, if you didn't want to manually check it or do any of this, and you didn't say word for word script, and you can't just automatically transcribe in YouTube, there's paid tools out there, paid platforms, services, and the one that we use is Rev, R-E-V dot com. This is not a paid promotion for them. We just use them. We like them. It's a dollar per minute. Very simple. And they make sure it's accurate. And it comes up at the right time. And then they just give you that SRT file that you can upload to Facebook or YouTube. Another paid tool to take a look at is SpeedScriber. Just came across this site. It seems to be an interesting mix of automated but with some machine learning built in. Lots of good buzzwords, but take a look at it if you're interested. Now, again, Facebook and YouTube are where it allows you to upload the SRT file natively and then have it engage or people can disengage it. YouTube is usually, I think, disengaged unless people engage it. Facebook is usually the closed captioning is engaged because I know most people don't watch it. But if you want it hard embedded, which right now I believe LinkedIn and Twitter don't support that native subtitles, you have to hard embed it if you want that to happen. You need to do that in your editing stage, whether it's in Premiere or Final Cut. We use Final Cut 10. And there's actually a plugin for Final Cut 10, I'm sure there's one for Premiere as well, that you can then import that SRT file and automatically create all the words. You don't have to mainly be typing in all the words. And you can change the font, the size, the color. And again, probably in social, you're going to do it in a square format so that it fills more of the screen. And then you have the subtitles beneath your video so it doesn't cover up anything. And that works really well. Please subscribe and also hit the little bell icon if you're on YouTube to get notified the next time we upload a video. I'm Alex with Your Local Studio. I'll see you next time.