Presenting your video content on social media platforms is a
great way to reach your audience. Video on Facebook has taken hold and the
platform now hosts more
than 8 billion views per day. Twitter Video is growing
exponentially, seeing 220x growth
in video views from mid-2015 to mid-2016. These platforms
certainly present an opportunity to reach viewers, but there’s a catch.
These viewers are watching but they’re not necessarily listening.
Content producers are reporting anywhere from 50 to 90% of
their audience on Facebook are watching video with the sound off. 90% of video
views on Twitter come from mobile devices and both Facebook and Twitter
default to having audio off when a video autoplays as users scroll through
their feeds. People want to watch, but they don’t necessarily want their
neighbor on the train to hear that cat video they’ve started watching.
These trends are pushing content providers to get smart on
captioning, which in truth is the responsible thing to do when taking those
with accessibility needs into account. Captioning can be a bit
intimidating. In addition to the process being foreign to many, different
platforms have different capabilities. YouTube and Facebook support closed
captions, or the ability to turn captioning on and off as the viewer is
watching a video. Twitter doesn’t support closed captions (yet) so the only
captioning option is open captioning, which is presenting captions as part of
the video itself.
While you could pay to have captioning done for you, we’d
like to show you a way to caption your videos for free with a little time and
effort.
Closed Captioning
First, set up a YouTube channel if you don’t have one
already. You don’t need to publish your content on YouTube but you can use
YouTube’s tools to generate closed captions for use both on YouTube and on
other platforms.
1: Upload your video content to YouTube, setting your
privacy setting to “private” so you can work with your content without the
world watching.
2: Edit your video’s settings, and click the “Subtitles
& CC” tab.
Note: YouTube can actually automatically caption your
video for you! If that process has run you’ll see the completed caption file on
the Subtitles & CC page:
If not, you can click “Request Processing” and the auto
captioning will run.
If you’re ok working from YouTube’s auto captioning, skip to
step 5! If you want a bit more control, continue on…
3: Click “Add new subtitles or CC”, then select your
language.
4: Options! We interrupt this workflow to let you know
that you have options here depending on the prep work you’ve decided to do
ahead of time.
4a: If you have a transcript of your content you can upload
that file. Once uploaded click “Set timings” and YouTube will do it’s best to
time the transcript to the audio in your video.
4b: If you don’t have a transcript file you can select
“Transcribe and auto-sync” which gives you a blank slate to type out your
text then have YouTube time that text to the audio in your video.
4c: Alternatively, you can select “Create new subtitles or
CC” and you can type text along with your video as it plays, instead of
allowing YouTube to time for you. More time consuming, but also more accurate.
5: Once your captions are in place, YouTube provides an
interface to edit the timing of those captions. You can tweak timing to your
heart’s content using this interface, or you can download the caption file (see
step 6) and edit in the text editor of your choice.
6: While viewing your caption file, you’ll get a button
titled “Actions” which drops down to present you with a few options. The
critical options to our workflow are the options to download the caption file.
Select “.srt” as this is the format accepted by Facebook.
Voila! You’ve just leveraged YouTube’s captioning features
to create a file that can be uploaded to Facebook and/or other video
services that support closed captioning.
Open Captioning
As mentioned above, Twitter’s video service doesn’t support
closed captioning at this time. That’s not however, stopping people from
watching Twitter Video content without audio. To present your video with
captions in this circumstance you’ll need to make the captions part of
the video itself, also known as “burning in” the captions. You can do this
in a few ways, including captioning by hand using the text features in
your preferred video editing software, and there are plenty of tutorials
available if that’s how you’d like to go.
The solution we’d like to show you here is to use HandBrake, an open source video transcoder
with a very useful subtitles feature. Required for this solution:
•
Handbrake
•
Your video
•
A properly timed .srt file
That .srt file we built in the closed captioning
instructions can be directly applied here to open cap your content. If you
skipped the closed captioning section to get straight to the open captioning
goods and you don’t yet have a .srt file, back to the top you go!
1: Once you have Handbrake installed, load your video for
processing using the “Source” button.
2: Select your video output settings. These are up to you;
we’re using a custom .mp4 setting since that’s currently the preferred
format for uploading to Twitter Video.
3: In the middle of the Handbrake window you’ll have
four tabs that break down the various components of your output settings.
Select “Subtitles.”
4: Under the Subtitles section click the “Track” dropdown
menu, then select “Add External SRT” and navigate to your .srt file.
5: Once your captions file is selected, click the “Burned
In” selection box. ISO-8859-1 defaults as the Srt Character Code (how
characters are identified and displayed), and this works. UTF-8 is also a common
character code. If you have non-traditional characters you should look further
into selecting the character code that will display the characters you
need properly.
6: Go back to the top of the window, click “Start” and let
your video process.
We suggest that if you’re going to caption your video
content, plan the visual treatments of your content accordingly. Captions will
appear on top of any other content in the lower portion of your video so please
be aware of this when designing lower thirds, bugs, and other graphics.
We hope this helps you tackle the task of captioning your
video content!
