DIY Captioning Your YouTube Videos
YouTube has made the process of creating captions as quick and easy as it possibly can. However, YouTube's aware that you've already expended so much time and energy in creating the videos and may not have any additional time or energy to spend on captioning. So, YouTube added a feature that allows your audience to generate captions for you. Instructions for leveraging Community Contributed captioning and for Do-It-Yourself (DIY) captioning are below.
Community Contributed Captions
If your video has the Privacy Setting set to Public, you can allow your audience to Contribute subtitles and captions. You will need to approve these contributions before they will appear on your videos.
Because there is a small chance that a random YouTuber will caption your videos by the time your students need them, we recommend that you find students who are willing and/or given incentive to caption them for you. Below are links to instructions related to Community Contributions:
- Managing Community Caption Contributions Links to an external site.
- Invite Viewers to Contribute Links to an external site.
- Contribute Subtitles and CC Links to an external site. (your contributors may want to borrow from the directions below as well)
DIY Captioning
When captioning, we've found the process of creating quality captions to be easier if we did our transcription and initial caption formatting in Word. Transcripts should record verbatim what is said, identify speakers, and identify important sound effects. It's best if the transcripts are as grammatically correct as possible too.
- Speaker identification goes in parentheses ( ).
- Sound effects go in brackets [ ].
- Corrections to audio should be in brackets [ ].
- Interruptions should be indicated by -- or —.
Once the transcript is complete, we put the entire transcript into a monospace font such as Courier New and then adjusted the document margins so that there were only 32 characters per line (which is part of DCMP's captioning Links to an external site. requirements). You can copy-paste the string of numbers below into your word document, give them the same font and size as the rest of the document, and then place the right margin just after the 32.
02 05 08 11 14 17 20 23 26 29 32
From there, use the enter key once to create new lines within a caption and use the enter key twice to create new captions. By the end, your document should look like this:
Hi, I'm a single-line caption.
This is a two-line caption.
See? Here's the second line.
This is a third caption,
and it also has two lines.
When subdividing the transcript into this format, do your best to follow these DCMP Links to an external site. rules for easier reading (particularly the first two):
- Unless one of the sentences is short (like one or two words) don't end one sentence and start another on the same line.
- Do not end a line or caption on a conjunction (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So).
- Try to not split people's names or titles across lines or captions.
- Try to not have modifying words on one line or caption and the word it modifies on another.
- Try to not split prepositional phrases across lines or captions.
- Try to not have auxiliary verbs on one line or caption and the verb it modifies on another.
Once finished, save the document as a Plain Text or .txt file. If a File Conversion window appears, set the text encoding to Other and then Unicode and check the Allow character substitution box (If you don't, you may need to replace apostrophes, quotation marks, and some additional punctuation later).
Next, go to your YouTube Video Manager Page Links to an external site. (1) and find the video you've been transcribing. Click the arrow to the right of the Edit button (2) to open a drop menu and then select Subtitles & CC (3).
In the page that opens, click the Add new subtitles or CC button (1) and then select or find the language you used in your transcript (2).
After the page refreshes, a new set of options will appear to the right of the video. Click the Upload a file button.
A pop-up will appear. In the pop-up, you'll need to make sure that transcript is selected (1), select the transcript file via the Choose File button (2), and then click the Upload button.
Once uploaded, you'll be taken to the Transcribe and auto-sync page. The transcript you uploaded will appear in the large field to the right of the video. Scroll through the transcript and replace any � with the appropriate punctuation marks (1). Afterwards, click the Set timings button (2).
YouTube will then take you back to the Manage subtitles and closed captions page while it works on synchronizing the transcript. How much time that takes will depend on how long your video is. When it finishes, you'll need to review how well the automated synchronization worked and publish the captions.
To start this process, refresh the page until the button in the My Drafts section has message like "5 minutes ago" or "1 hour ago" to the right of the language instead of a sync symbol. At that point, click on that button. Do not click any buttons that end in "(Automatic)" (unless you want to unpublish these automatically generated captions).
After clicking the button under My Drafts, the caption editor will open up. From here, play the video and adjust the individual caption timings as needed. To make adjustments, you can click on and edit the start and end time on each individual caption, or you can use the timeline below the video and drag the start and end points for each caption (1). If you think to, please make sure that a caption appears at the very beginning of the video even if the caption says [silence] or [music]. When you're finished, click the Publish button in the top right of the page (2).
Congratulations! You have captions on your video!
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Last Updated Fall 2016