writes:Some of you have been curious about how I'm captioning some of these videos, so I thought I'd share how it's done. And hopefully some of you can share what you know, and we'll all be educated.
I think everyone who is on Facebook has seen the auto-generated captions they put on videos, where the quality is terrible.
The alternative is to upload a captions file at the same time as you upload a video (called a 'reel' on Facebook). Currently, you can't add captions to a reel you've already published, you can only add captions when you upload the reel.
The captions file is called a 'subrip' file, ending in a .srt extension. You can upload multiple caption files for each reel, one per language.
On Facebook, the file name must also include the language and location. For example, for American English, the file name ends '.en_US.srt'. If you are uploading other languages, you might need to do a search to find out the correct extension.
The file is a text file, and can be created or edited in any text editor. Here is an example of the first few lines of the captions file from Austrian Gold, Mexican Sand::
1
00:00:00,220 --> 00:00:05,200
[singing] The
2
00:00:05,260 --> 00:00:10,220
ship set sail from Miramar across the salt
and foam to
3
00:00:10,260 --> 00:00:14,960
a land of ancient eagles a thousand miles
from home.
4
00:00:15,200 --> 00:00:19,940
With a crown of golden laurel and a heart
of Austrian blue,
Depending on your text editor and how you have it set up, you may not be able to see the line-breaks. What I get is:
ship set sail from Miramar across the saltand foam to
That's inconvenient, but I can work around it.
As you've probably guessed, the format is caption number (not displayed), time to appear, and the caption itself.
You can make a captions file by hand, as you probably already know what the script or lyrics are, and figuring out the timing by hand. To test your captions, you'll need a video player which allows captions (such as good old Media Player in Windows).
Alternately, you can use an AI to do it. The one I've been using is Transcri, an AI specializing in creating caption files. They offer a limited free membership, and levels of paid monthly memberships. A Starter membership runs €5.60 EUR per month, and allows one hour worth of captions (plus they added a 30 minute bonus). You're limited to one language at a time, and there is a 1 GB limit on file sizes.
So how does it work? You upload the file – you probably want to upload the audio file, not the entire video, if that is an option – click, and wait. Then you can download a folder containing the captions file, selecting how many lines you want per caption (usually two for wide-format videos, three for skinny-format videos).
After you download the captions file, you'll need to add the language/location extension so that you can upload it to Facebook.
Be sure to open the captions file in a text editor to correct any errors.
Then upload your video to Facebook as usual, and on the second screen, you can also upload the captions file.
Do you have a better method, or know how to add captions for non-Facebook videos? Please let us know.