Have you noticed that your Facebook news feed is inundated with videos splashed with text “narrating” what you’re watching? With audio being optional on Facebook videos, and a view being counted at 3 seconds, publishers are doing what they can to keep you hooked. It’s working. Digiday recently published that 85% of Facebook video is watched without sound. And Discovery Digital Networks tested captioning 125 videos and found an increase of 13.48% during the first 14 days after adding captions.
Many publishers bake the titles right into the video during editing, as seen in this example from Mic:
But you can get text on video using a simple template, even after the video is done and published. It may not be as pretty, but it will do the trick.
You can add captions to videos on most sites, including Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo, by uploading a SubRip (.srt) file with your video. If you’ve already uploaded the video, you can still add captions by uploading a subtitles file. A simple and widely accepted subtitle file is a SubRip (.srt) file.
Download a SubRip (.srt) subtitle file template. (If you can’t open it, try TextEdit or Notepad.)
SubRip files contain formatted lines of plain text in groups separated by a blank line. Subtitles are numbered sequentially, starting at 1. The timecode format used is hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds.
1
00:03:50,671 - -> 00:03:51,734
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
2
00:03:53,858 - -> 00:03:55,105
Proin tellus lectus, tristique eget cursus sit amet, porta et lectus.
3
00:03:55,798 - -> 00:03:56,887
Proin egestas tristique erat. Donec metus nibh, mollis sed placerat ac, ultricies ut purus.
Or use YouTube’s subtitle tool: