Help with DIY Subtitling

We live in an era where it’s never been easier to upload content to the internet – photos, selfies, comments and videos. Meetings and webinars can be live captioned with some video conferencing software – automated and manually with a Speech To Text Reporter.

Speaking of auto generated subtitles, are you still frustrated with some of the gobbledygook that comes up on YouTube videos sometimes? Whilst it’s true to say that the technology is improving, there is currently no substitute for a human eye to glance over your auto-generated contents and edit the parts that don’t make sense.

At Linguistpd, we’ve been using an online video editing software Kapwing for adding subtitles to our training. The auto-generated subtitles are pretty good and it’s very easy to edit the parts them yourselves. What’s more, the free version is great and provides the following features:

• No watermarks
• 250MB file upload limit
• Export videos up to 7 minutes long
• Publish up to 3 hours of video per month
• Edit and store content up to 2 days old
• Access to all tools

We found the tools very user-friendly and easy to get the hang of. We simply uploaded the video, added auto-generated captions, and then edited the parts that weren’t quite right.

Here’s a screenshot to show you how it looks:

For longer videos and more useful features, at the time of writing you’ll pay US$20 for the pro version of Kapwing. With this pro subscription you’ll also be able to download your subtitles as .srt files, which is useful for uploading into other software and providing options to turn the subtitles on or off.

Here’s an example of a video clip we subtitled using Kapwing:

Have you found other useful subtitling software? Let us know!