4 December 2014

Creating captions for Youtube videos

YouTube has offered automatic captions for years on many of the videos it hosts, with text generated by the same speech recognition algorithms used by other services like Google Voice and Google Now. These "auto-caps" are often a help to educators or those with hearing impairments, but YouTube admits that the quality of the captions created by the speech recognition software can vary from video to video -and may not even work on some clips.

If you are creating videos and uploading them to the site, you can personally edit the text on any automatically generated captions on your clips. Just log into your YouTube account, go to the Video Manager area and next to the clip you want to fix, click the drop-down menu next to the Edit button. Select Captions and edit the text in the caption fields as you see fit. The Captions page in the YouTube Help online guide has links to several articles about adding your own captions, subtitles and transcripts for videos, as well as a full tutorial in the Creator Academy area of the site. As a video-sharing business, YouTube has a how-to video on adding closed captions and subtitles too. 

The Caption It Yourself site offers tips and basic guidelines for creating video captions, as well as links to tools for creating captions. If you do not like the automatically generated captions, third-party programs like SynchriMedia's MovieCaptioner for Windows and Mac OS X give you full control over the text displayed on your videos. Voxcribe is another service for captioning videos and uses speech recognition to transcribe the text. If you use additional software, YouTube has more information about uploading subtitles or closed captions created in other programmes with your clips.

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