As the largest video repository on Earth, it is somewhat surprising for videos to NOT show up on YouTube. It is a pretty safe bet that everyone knows about YouTube, and in fact, you probably already have an account.
However, if you’ve never uploaded a video to YouTube, you might be surprised at the tools available for enhancing your videos. Among these tools is a robust set of captioning tools.
Auto-Captions
Many people have encountered the auto-captions from YouTube.
A nifty novelty for most, a comic example of how AI and speech recognition can go wrong much of the time, the auto-captions of YouTube are certainly not a reliable solution for a student who is deaf or hard of hearing. The accuracy of the captions is too often too far off the mark to trust as sufficient means for a student who is deaf to understand what is being communicated.
However, YouTube makes it possible to edit the auto-captions it creates. Using the YouTube Subtitle tools, you can correct mis-recognized words, add punctuation and capitalization, and adjust timing and presentation for the captions.
YouTube Workflow for Captioning
YouTube provides a variety of options for adding captions to your videos:
- You can upload a caption file if you have one.
- You can manually transcribe and then auto-sync captions for your video.
- You can wait for YouTube to process your video and generate auto-captions.
Once you have caption files within YouTube, you can also download the caption file and edit or use it with your local video or captioning software.
YouTube Studio
YouTube provides a set of tools for managing and editing the videos you upload to the YouTube service. It is called the “YouTube Studio”
Upload Video
The first step in captioning a video on YouTube is to upload a video.
You can find the upload option in the upper right-hand corner of the screen:
- Click on the camera icon with a white “plus” sign in the middle.
- When the menu opens, select the option “Upload Video”.
Captioning Tools – Subtitles
When you have a video loaded into YouTube, you can select it from the “Videos” section of the YouTube Studio.
With the video selected, choose the “Subtitles” option from the left-hand menu.
The Subtitles screen will open, allowing you to manage the subtitles for your video.
If your video has been uploaded for at least an hour, it will likely have auto-captions generated, though the time required for generating auto-captions depends on the length and complexity of spoken dialog in your video, and how finicky the AI is behaving that day.
If you click the “Add” button, you will be presented with a menu of three choices for how you can add a subtitle track: “Upload a file”, “Transcribe and auto-sync”, and “Create new subtitles or CC”.
Click on the menu for a subtitle to get a menu of options for editing that subtitle.
Clicking “Edit on Classic Studio” will open your video in caption editing mode, allowing you to adjust the captions and the timing of their presentation on screen.
Formatting Captions
There are a variety of considerations to keep in mind when formatting your captions. Refer to the Captioning Key for the complete set of formatting rules. Here are just a few you should know about and adopt into your workflow:
Fonts, Line Length, Presentation Rate, and Line Breaks
Traditional captions are formatted as white, mixed case fonts at approximately 32 characters per line.
Display each line of captions for at least 1.5 seconds, but no longer than 6 seconds.
Never break a line of captions between a modifier and the word it modifies, in a prepositional phrase, after a conjunction, or separating an auxiliary verb from the word it modifies.
Viewing Captions
With YouTube and any other video player, the ability to playback the captions you create is an important consideration.
YouTube provides great support for captions. You can turn the captions on or off by clicking on the CC at the bottom of the Video Player. You can configure the captions and choose from different caption tracks (if available), by clicking on the gear icon next to the CC in the YouTube video player.
Downloading Captions
You can also download the caption files from YouTube as .vtt, .srt, or.sbv files to use with your local video player and/or editor.
This allows you to utilize the auto-caption function of YouTube to generate the beginnings of a text transcript/caption file. This can be a useful option when you need to distribute a video within your LMS.
YouTube Supports Captioning
Now you know YouTube offers a great captioning tool, especially at the price.
You can use the YouTube captioning tools to add or clean up the captions for your videos hosted on YouTube, or as an element of your workflow for generating captions for use in your school’s LMS.
Thanks for reading!
