 Hey guys welcome back to my youtube channel this is Daniel Rosal here today we are going to be talking about captions yes captions as in subtitles not maybe the most exciting of subjects within the quite exciting world of video content creation but it is a topic that is important topical and my prediction going to be more important as we're seeing accessibility becoming a more pronounced thing on the internet generally not just in video and that's one of the main benefits of captions of course is for people who either can't hear at all or have difficulty with their hearing it allows them to access video content visually through their eyes now i want to just give a quick primer on on caption creation for people who've never done it before who don't know how when you watch a video and you click on subtitles how that whole process of making those captions actually works so for the benefit of clarity i'm going to add two types of captions to this video so that you can understand the difference one of them is what are typically called hard coded captions this is when captions are added into the video just as i've added them to this video in the bottom of the screen you can see the captions appearing there now there are pros and cons to hard captions the advantage of using hard captions is that well the viewer the viewer doesn't have to click anything if you're just bringing captions to one language like you think everyone is going to be watching your videos going to be an english speaker and you want to make it really simple for them you want to distribute your video via twitter linked in youtube different platforms and you don't you don't want to confuse people that they're going to have to click on this button to get the captions up just add them to the video now there's a reason why that is becoming less and less ideal because alongside that format captions you have something called caption files and the most common file format for captions or subtitles is a file called srt now srt from a technical standpoint it's almost as simple as it gets it's literally words and timestamps between one one second and five second put these words on the screen then put these words on the screen then put these words on the screen i'm not even going to open a subtitle file for this video because i've done it in other videos but um that's really all it is now when you upload a subtitle file to a video platform let's take youtube although linkedin now also has the ability to import srt files for captions why is this better than hard coding well there's actually a few reasons if you're talking about reaching people um who speak other languages one very useful youtube feature that has been rolled out partially on the desktop and is being rolled out to many different languages currently is automatic caption translation now the problem with hard coding your captions into video is that it's not readable to a computer i mean probably it is there's something called optical character recognition and the computer could parse it frame by frame and pull out captions but that technology just isn't really around at the moment the technology however that is alive kicking and developing very quickly is automatic translation of closed captions so that means if i upload my caption file so for this video i'm going to be as i mentioned hard coding these captions so you can see what that looks like and i'm also going to be uploading a captions file as an srt to youtube and you can as you're watching this video you can turn on or turn off those captions and as you do so you should be able to see them appear on your screen or not appear on your screen now should you add hard captions and closed captions that's kind of a it looks certainly if you're doing it in the same language it looks a bit weird but just remember that when you have hard captions in your video they're always going to be there the main advantage of subtitling in the more modern and professional way is that you can toggle them on and toggle them off so if the person watching the video doesn't need subtitles we don't need to clutter the screen with subtitles if the person wants some titles they can turn them on but as i said there's two real advantages to subtitles and there's probably more that i'm just not thinking about one is for people who are deaf or hard of hearing that's very important and the second one that people don't think about but it's going now the reason i said subtitles are going to be more and more important so that's why i recommend everyone using video for marketing purposes start adding them and by the way creating subtitles is not easy there are ways to make it easier currently using youtube as an example and on other platforms ai does part of the subtitling that's the best practice modern workflow is an automated speech to text engine will provide what i think what i call an 80 sub title it's 80 correct with some spelling errors and as those ai algorithms evolve the machine generated subtitles are going to be getting progressively better meaning there's going to be progressively less work involved in just making those fine touches because there's always capital letters missing or you know words that the ai just got wrong there's always going there's always that at the moment but as those as that technology continues to mature it's going to be easier to really perfect subtitles with very minimal effort so the difference between hard coding your captions and uploading subtitle files just to really recap and emphasize if you hard code your captions they're physically embedded into the video file you can turn them off they're there the viewer has no options and the next just the advantage of that is that well if you if it's really vital that you show captions for your video to be intelligible and you don't want anyone to miss the captions one way of doing that is just putting them in the video and they're going to be there whether your viewer wants them or not but in most cases it's probably best to avoid hard captioning or at least do hard captioning alongside embedded captioning if you have embedded captions and you upload them using an srt file your viewer is going to have the option to turn them off or turn them off and turn them on and turn them off and very importantly and this is going to be getting more important as youtube finishes rolling out its auto translation algorithm it gives you the ability to make your content accessible to literally everyone in the world even people who don't speak your language once you add a caption in your language let's say english auto translate in youtube and this feature will probably be rolling out in other platforms so they don't fall behind they can automatically translate those captions to every language from swahili to portuguese to danish etc and that is massive massive from the perspective of a content creator looking to increase your reach for five minutes of your time for adding the subtitles to a three minute video you might be able to make your video accessible not just to the deaf and hard of hearing but to hundreds of millions of people around the world who don't speak your language but can rely upon upon automatic caption translation to be able to read and understand and engage with your content because you can even auto translate comments now so we're seeing that automatic translation which is getting better and better is shrinking the world further and further making language barriers less barriers basically hope that was useful if you are producing video and thinking about adding captions not sure which approach is best i hope that outlined the pros and cons and gave you some clarity and if you do want us to get more content like this about video as well as other subjects do of course consider subscribing to this youtube channel it's been a pleasure speaking about captions today thank you guys for watching