Wondershare’s Filmora is a powerful video editing program that you can use to create some compelling video content. You can take your video editing skills up a notch or two with the program, but one thing you should definitely add to your repertoire is Filmora captioning.
Adding captions to your Filmora videos has various benefits that make it worth your while to do. Here’s how to add captions in Filmora in 4 quick and easy steps:
1. Edit your video
Before adding any captions, you should first piece together your video in Filmora. This includes adding your footage in your desired order and placing effects wherever necessary.
In any case, make sure that you have your video with the proper ordering and duration to make the later captioning process simpler. Captioning should be the final step of your video creation process. Otherwise, if you make any edits in between captioning, it can make the subtitling process confusing and complicated.
2. Transcribe the draft
You might be thinking, “Okay, adding text in Filmora will be the next step.” That will come eventually, but for now, you’ll do something even more beneficial: transcribing your draft.
Transcriptions have multiple benefits outside being subtitle files. For instance, transcripts are text files, meaning that they’re much faster to navigate via the search function. This can help you repurpose your transcriptions into blogs and social media posts or even plan future content if you’re a content creator.
Here’s how you transcribe the draft:
- Open Filmora and the text processor of your choice side-by-side
- Play the preview draft and type the audio at the same time.
- Rewind the audio whenever necessary to catch dialogue that you missed.
- Save your transcript as a .txt file for future reference.
However, transcribing audio can be a long and tedious process — so much so that you might want to give up the benefits of captioning just to avoid the hassle. Fortunately, there’s an easier way: instead of transcribing the video yourself, you can send your audio file to an automated transcription service like FreeTranscriptions! This way, you can immediately receive a transcript that you can use to add subtitles to your videos easily.
3. Add the subtitle text
All you have to do now is add your subtitle text to the video. The advantage of transcribing your video first is that you simply have to copy and paste the text on the correct timestamps.
To add your subtitles:
- Create a separate video track. It should be on top of all the other video tracks.
- On the tabs section, select “Titles.”
- There are multiple options to create your subtitles. For simple captions, select “Plain Text” on the left bar, and click and drag “Basic 1” into the subtitle video track.
- Adjust the duration of the text element based on the audio.
- Double left-click the newly made text block on the preview screen and copy-paste the corresponding subtitle text from your transcript.
- Adjust the font options of the subtitle text to your liking.
- Copy and paste the text block on your subtitle track and repeat steps 4-6 until you’ve captioned the entire video.
4. Preview and proofread
After you finish captioning, the last thing you need to do is to preview your final video and make any necessary adjustments. If you do find any errors, pause the preview and correct them. Here are some examples of subtitling errors you have to look out for:
- Spelling errors
- Subtitles lasting too long/short
- Subtitle font being too large/small
And there you have it: subtitles on your video made in Filmora. Having subtitles on your videos offers many crucial benefits, like increased accessibility and better SEO if you’re uploading it on platforms like YouTube.
However, the process of creating subtitles can be a major turn-off, especially if you’re planning to create multiple videos. Thankfully, you can reap the benefits of captions without the hassle by using an automated transcription service like FreeTranscriptions! Simply drag and drop an audio file of your video and almost immediately receive a transcript file that you can use for an easier Filmora captioning experience.