Add captions to your videos
What you need: Subtitle Edit; VLC; Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 Time required: 30 minutes
Youtube (and now Chrome – see page 7) can create captions for your videos automatically, but you’ll first have to upload the videos to the web, which you may not be comfortable doing. In this Workshop, we’ll show you how to create captions – either exact transcripts of dialogue or simply text explaining what’s going on in each scene – for videos stored on your PC. We’ll also explain how to turn them on and off when watching.
STEP 1
Download the latest version (3.6.0 at the time of writing) of Subtitle Edit from www.snipca.com/37673 - click the link for the ZIP file just above ‘Windows installer version’ 1 . Subtitle Edit doesn’t have a built-in video player to preview your videos, but it works with the free VLC player. If you don’t already have VLC installed, download it from www.videolan. org – click the blue ‘Download VLC’ button 2 in the middle of the page. Once you’ve installed both programs, open Subtitle Edit.
STEP 2
Before loading your video file, you first need to tell
Subtitle Edit that you want it to use VLC to preview your videos. Open the Options menu 1 , then select ‘Settings…’. In the window that opens, select ‘Video player’ 2
from the list on the left, then ‘VLC media player’ on the right 3 . If you installed the portable version of VLC, click the three dots 4 to the right of the ‘VLC path…’ box, then navigate to the folder where you saved VLC and double-click the ‘vlc.exe’ file. Click OK to save your changes.
STEP 3
Click the Video menu, ‘Open video file…’
1 , then locate
the video you want to caption (Subtitle Edit works with all popular video formats). Alternatively, you can drag the video file directly into the preview window 2 . Your video’s waveform (a visual representation of its audio track) should now appear in the bottom-right window 3 . If not, click this window once and the waveform should appear within a few seconds.
STEP
4
In the bottom-right window, click and drag your cursor to where you want your subtitle to appear; for longer videos, use the zoom controls 1 to focus on specific sections. Once you’ve made your selection, right-click it then select ‘Play selection’ 2 to preview it. You can adjust the selection by clicking and dragging its left and right edges. Once you’re happy with it, right-click the selection once again, but this time select ‘Add text here’ 3 . You’ll notice a new entry appears in the panel at the top 4 , along with your chosen section’s start and end times, and total duration.
STEP
5
Type your caption for the section in the Text box
1 .
Click ‘Auto br’ 2 and Subtitle Edit will add line breaks after every 42 characters, making the caption easier to read. To remove these automatic line breaks, click Unbreak 3 . As you type, Subtitle Edit displays the ‘Chars/sec’ value 4 – this calculates the length of the section and how many characters the viewer will need to read every second. If this value goes over 25, the label turns red (indicating the viewer may not have enough time to read the caption before it disappears). If this happens, either cut down the caption or extend the length of the section (as explained in Step 4).
STEP
6
Repeat Steps 4 and 5, adding as many sections and captions as you need. Note that you can’t add sections that overlap. If you want to remove a caption, select it in the table, then press Delete. When you’ve finished, click File, followed by ‘Save as…’ 1 . You can now select the format the captions will be saved in, but it’s best to leave it at the default of SRT because this is supported by most video players. By default, the subtitle file will have the same name as your video (albeit with the ‘.srt’ extension) and will be saved in the same folder – it’s best to leave both of these file names unchanged, otherwise your video player won’t be able to automatically locate the relevant subtitle file for the video.
STEP
7
Open your favourite video player,
load your video, then turn on subtitles. Precisely how you do this depends on the video player. In VLC, press V to display subtitles 1 while your video is playing. If your subtitle file doesn’t have the same name as the video file or is located in a different folder, first load the video then open the Subtitle menu, select ‘Add Subtitle File…’ 2 , then locate the file. To view subtitles in Plex, load the video, click Settings (threesliders icon 3 ), then select ‘Unknown (SRT External)’ 4 under Subtitles.