Adding captions or subtitles to your videos

Go back 18 months and we very rarely added captions to anything. Flash forward to now and we spend more time than ever creating accurate and well presented captions for a vast number of projects.

Traditionally associated with accessibility, captions not only allow people with hearing impairments to read dialogue, but it also allows people sat on their phones with the sound off to read too (we’re all guilty of this!). So why is captioning so important, and what is the process?
100 million hours of videos are watched on Facebook every single day*. Add that to over 1 billion users on Youtube* and that’s a lot of viewers. Youtube reports that video consumption on mobile devices increases by 100% year on year*, with mobile making up 40% of Youtube’s entire traffic.* Now think about how often you sit with your sound down whilst watching a video. It has become almost second nature to many of us to read captions instead of listening.
Captioning is a surefire way to increase engagement with those users who don’t want their boss or fellow commuters to hear what they’re watching, so why wouldn’t you do it?
The likes of Youtube and Facebook have their own, automatic caption generators which work with… well, varying success. One of our favourite mis-heard phrases from the almighty AI captioner was on a project we worked on for De Montfort University which became ‘Monsters University’ on numerous occasions throughout the video.

Whilst these automatic transcription services work relatively well and are free, nothing beats the ears of an actual human, writing the captions manually word by word. At Crosscut Media, we have a 2-stage process for burnt-in captioning: transcription & timing, and then design & quality control.
The first stage is provided by our transcript provider, who are a skilled team of extremely fast-fingered typists who transcribe, and more importantly, time each video. The timing ensures that we receive a timed caption file which can be loaded directly into our editing software and each sentence will sync up beautifully with the existing audio.
The second stage involves us changing the font and overall appearance of the captions, to ensure they fit in with a clients brand guidelines, or that the captions match previous videos for consistency. We then go through each video to double check spelling and timing, and clean up anything that may be askew.
If you’d like to find out more about our captioning service, please don’t hesitate to contact us using the details on our contact us page.