Transcription
- Adding captions or subtitles to YouTube videos is really a must. It helps with two very important things. Firstly, it does help with a deaf or hard-of-the-hearing audience to make your video accessible to them, right? They could use captions or subtitles to follow along with your video. You could also use this and it's very beneficial for SEO, search engine optimization. So a lot of my videos show up number one on Google and they show up number one on YouTube because of this SEO tactic as well as some others in combination together. Google especially recently started going through the transcript of the videos and pulling up separate sections in the search results. So make sure if you're not adding captions or subtitles to your YouTube videos, you start right now. I'm gonna show you a few ways for adding captions to your YouTube videos. I'll show you here with a channel I have not done this to where I just make YouTube tutorials, but basically, click your profile icon on top and then click YouTube Creator Studio to land on this page. And right here on the left side, there's a whole subtitle section that most people never clicked on before. This brings up all your videos in a recent order. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on one that I want to add to. Now, I recommend if you haven't published a video you want to subtitle or add captions to, go ahead and do that first, and then you could see it over here. So if you haven't published, just publish first and then jump over here, click on that video. And here that video is most likely going to have an English subtitle by default. YouTube does create a default subtitle automatically in most cases, and that might be over here, but either way, we want to add our own because the automatically generated YouTube subtitle is not really that great. So let's go ahead and press add right here. And you have basically three different options for adding subtitles inside of YouTube. So it says add your captions by uploading a file, auto-syncing, and typing manually. I'll mention each one briefly here and I'll show you in more detail a couple of 'em. So if you upload your file, this is basically if someone else or a different program created your subtitle files for you. Now, typically the supportive format, a very common one is called SRTs, .srt is the file type. And I'll show you where to get one that is very, very, 99.99% accurate. So if you're doing this for professional reasons, business reasons, or you really taking your YouTube channel seriously, this might be the best bet. The second one is auto-sync. I'll show you in a second. This is very easy, but it does still take a little bit of time. And then you could choose to type manually. Basically, with type manually, you could go ahead and check this on pause while typing, and then let me just go ahead and mute this. And then you press play and then you listen to yourself, and then you go over here and I know I said, Hey everyone. Okay, you type it and you see this appearing here, and then to add another section, once you get to that point in the video, you press the plus sign and it makes another section here. And the same thing, you go ahead and press play. You come over here and you type. And because I have paused while typing checked, yeah, actually auto pauses for me, and then everything shows up here in linear order. Now, I highly recommend you don't do this option because it takes a very long time. The previous option, I'll jump back to show you that one, I'm gonna press X right here. I'll go back to add. Now, auto-sync is usually using the caption that is automatically created, but let me go ahead and press that. And there's no caption here. So I still have to type in everything I'm saying and then try to automatically sync it up. So I would type in every word that is spoken in the video. The problem here is this video skipped a whole automated caption creation for some reason. So really the only way that I could do this is by adding my own, uploading my own SRT or captions file. And I'm gonna do this last, but right now, let me go to a different video that has the automated captions here. So I know this one has automated captions. Almost all of them do, but sometimes it does skip for some reason. So right here, it says subtitles published automatically. I could go ahead and edit and duplicate. So I need to press it here and override the existing one right here. Okay, so here is what you get. This is your full script and I'm gonna press edit timing so I could see it in these blocks that go along with the timing, right? So I don't have to start completely from scratch. Some of those boxes are already here and I could jump in and fix what is being said. So if I press play, okay, so I started with the word probably. So I'll have to capitalize that. And I'm using the Grammarly plug-in here. So it's actually making things easier for me to auto-correct as far as spelling goes, okay? Then, after I go through this whole thing, and you could see for these long videos, this could take me quite a while. The last option doesn't require any time 'cause someone else will take care of it for you, but I'm gonna go ahead and press publish here. Let's assume I just fixed everything and you could see it creates a new one, this one, that is published by the creator. So that's what I recommend you do. Click auto-sync. If it's not there, and auto-sync is not an option, and it's blank, you, unfortunately, have to either type it out or get an SRT file made. And the last option I'll show you is if you press add over here is when you go to upload your own file with timing, that's what you want, you want someone to create an SRT file that has timing. You need to upload an SRT file here, okay? So where do you get that SRT file? The platform I use and I'll put a link below in the description to this platform is called Rev, and I'm gonna place a new order here. And I want captions. I'm gonna go ahead and choose captions in this case so I could use it on YouTube. And it gives you three different options here. So you could upload that video file from your computer. You could share a link. So if you already published that YouTube video, which I have done in this case, I'm gonna just copy the URL of that video. And what's really cool is you could also directly link to your YouTube or Vimeo channel from here and they take care of the uploading for you. So you only do this part and they always take care of uploading the SRT file for you. So if you want to fully automate things, you could go ahead and give it access. In this case, I'm gonna paste the URL. And this is the YouTube video, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and copy. I'm gonna go to the details. I'm gonna copy this link right here. I'm gonna copy that, bring it over here, and then right-click and paste, and I'll press add right here. And then it's gonna mention that you could again do this directly from a YouTube account, which I recommend if you do this more than once. I'm gonna press I'm Finished, and it's gonna tell you how long it's gonna take. So you're gonna get it the same day here, just in a few hours. And my video is about 10 minutes here and it's only costing me $12. You could rush this too if you're doing this for work for example. And I usually don't do any of these other options. And as I mentioned, the SRT file, that's the format that you're going to get. There are others, but that's what I recommend, especially if you're going to YouTube, and press checkout. And there you go, my order has been submitted. I could place another, or I could just wait till I get the SRT file. And once I get that SRT file, I'm gonna show you how to add it from the upload file and what ends up happening. Again, that is getting created by a human being. So it's not an automated process. That's why it's taking a few hours, but it's gonna be 99.9999% accurate. So I wanted to show you all the different options here. Okay, so I got the files back from Rev, and I actually ordered a few more while that was happening. And basically, when you click it, this is the layout that you actually get. This is on Rev's website. And if you wanted to make any changes, you could make changes here. Now, in my case, I just want to download the SRT files. So I'm gonna press download here. And SRT is the output, and I'm gonna press download right here, and it's gonna download it to my computer. So I could go back to YouTube now, and then here, I'm gonna go back to subtitles right over here. I'm gonna go ahead and press add next to subtitles on that video. And I'm gonna go ahead and upload that file with timing and just like that, it's gonna upload it to YouTube and it's gonna lay it out exactly based on this time. And things are capitalized correctly. There are periods where periods need to be. There are dashes where they need to be. And in this case, I had a hundred percent accuracy when I went through this transcription. If I wanted to make any changes, I could do it just like before, but I'm gonna press publish since I've already reviewed everything and no changes were required. And you can see right here now it's been published. Now, if the video gets played on YouTube here and the captions are turned on, it's gonna play what I got from Rev. And the last thing I'll show you while we're here, look down here. This is a plugin I have called Tube Buddy. And this is something you could get for free too. And it does have some paid upgrades that I have, but I don't have the paid upgrade here. So it says upgrade now, but it says it automatically translates your title and description to maximize your reach. That's really cool. So it's gonna show you in what other languages is this video being watched? So let me go to my other channel where I actually have a paid subscription to Tube Buddy, so I could show you what it does. Okay, so check out this video here. You could see that I have different languages here. And if I transcribe my title and description in a different language, it might help with my reach. So here I could press add language and this lets you pick a different one. So it looks like in this video, Hindi is the second most popular language. So I could select that from this list and it's gonna add it over here. So now, if I add title and description, look at this, I could press translate again. This is by Tube Buddy. If I press this right here, look at that. It translated the title and the description for me. And it's not gonna interfere with the English one, right? That's the original language it's gonna stay. This is the translation. And then you could use other platforms again, like Rev, if you wanted to add a subtitle in a different language. So Rev does provide different language transcription as well, so you could go ahead and upload those from there. I hope you found one of those captioning methods on YouTube useful, and you could actually take the time to caption all your videos or as much as you can. Thanks so much for watching. Again, everything is linked below that we talked about throughout this video, and I hope to catch you next time.