Subtitles are a great way to expand your potential audience to other countries and cultures. When displayed as closed captions, they’re also a great service to the hearing impaired community. Some platforms require you to add subtitles/closed captions to even qualify, and the latest of them is Amazon Video Direct.
After writing about the new service last week, I realized that this subtitling/captioning requirement would be the biggest challenge for most of us, leaving the need to find an easy way to add them. So, I created this long-form video to help, with an eye toward making your work eligible for the new Amazon Video Direct platform, using case studies of my own ranging from the old (Lowertown Paducah) to the new (Sitka: A Piano Documentary). I show you how to get an automatic head start, using free tools like YouTube’s voice recognition, and an application called Subtitle Edit. And once you’ve gotten your subtitles in good shape, I show how easy it is to get a head start translating your subtitles into more languages. Lastly, I show you a backup trick, using stand-alone voice-recognition software.
Subtitling used to cost lots of time and money, but I think I’ve found an easy way for you to do it yourself. Let me know in the comments here, or at the video, how it goes for you.
Thanks for stepping us through an alternative way for DIY closed captioning. Though still not easy, at least your method makes it easier.
Instead of Dragon, consider trying out Google’s Voice Typing … http://bit.ly/voicetyping . For videos with excellent sound quality, I’ve found Google’s voice typing to be quite accurate when played through the computer’s audio system.
Thanks Scott, that’s a great tip — a much more affordable option than buying the Nuance software, though hopefully in most cases the YouTube automated approach works first, especially after uploading an audio-focused proxy export that isolates the spoken words as advised in the first part of this video tutorial. Great, though, to have another backup, thanks again.
Videos missing.https://youtu.be/CReuU07VclA
Thanks, that’s a good reminder for me to follow up on a bug where WordPress stopped letting me specify the video under Post Format options. For now, I’ve embedded it into the body of this post. Thanks again.