One of the techniques I’ve been meaning to learn for some time is how to add subtitles to my YouTube videos. There are a couple of benefits to adding subtitles to your videos:
- It allows people who are deaf or hard of hearing to enjoy your videos
- It’s a great way to target a market in a different language
Note: You can use this program to also create subtitles for all movies, video and audio. I will be covering that in a future post. However, today’s post will be solely focusing on adding subtitles to your YouTube videos.
If your business involves quite a bit of video marketing, I would suggest spending a few dollars and outsourcing the transcription task in order to use your time more effectively.
Let’s get started …
Step 1: Go to DivXLand Media Subtitler and install the software on to your computer. DivXLand Media Subtitler is a freeware program capable of creating plain text subtitle files for your movies and videos.
Step 2: Create a text file using Notepad that contains all the information contained on the video you want to transcribe.
Tip: Put each new sentence on a new line. For long sentences separate into two lines. You can also insert a pipeline [|] character in the position where a line to be split. You can create a pipeline by pressing the ALT key and entering #’s 124 on your keyboard.
Step 3: Once you are done transcribing save the file as a plain text document (.txt file).
Step 4: Next open the DivXLand Software and click on ‘File’ then ‘Open text’ and locate your transcribed text file.
Step 5: Open your video/audio file to add the subtitles to.
Step 6: Play the video and when selected text line is about to be spoken in the video, press and hold the Apply button until the line was spoken completes. Once the line ends deselect the Apply button and then reselect when the next line begins.
Continue to do this in synchrony with the video until the video completes.
Step 7: Once video is completed you can select ‘preview only’ to view your work and make sure the subtitles are in synchrony with the video. If not, just start all over.
Other Functions:
There are other functions that the program offers that I won’t get into with this tutorial. However, I would like to point out the ‘spell check’ option which I think is very useful. Also you can add, remove or edit a caption. Be sure to use these options prior to adding the subtitles to the video/audio file.
Spell check
Step 8: Click on ‘File’ >>’Save As’ >> Select Format SRT >> Click on ‘OK’ >> save video to your computer with same file name as video.
Note: By default, the video is saved in English. If you are are using another language you will need to add that to the .srt file name.
For example, instead of my_video.srt, it would be something like my_video_Spanish.srt.
So now we have a completed .srt file on our computer ready to be uploaded to YouTube. This completes Part 1of adding subtitles to YouTube videos. Tomorrow I will show you the next steps you will need to take to add the formatted text to your uploaded video as well as an a video overview of the whole process.
Until then …
Update: Please click here for the completion of this tutorial and video overview.
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