The best ways to add automatic subtitles to your videos

Subtitling videos can be a tedious and time-consuming job. But it is necessary if you want your videos to be searchable and accessible. Fortunately, there are good apps, websites and tools that can make subtitling a lot faster. In this article we’ll discuss some of them!

 

Easy to use subtitling apps

Let’s start with some apps that make subtitling a lot easier. An easy option is Clips. Clips a free app from Apple. It has an automatic subtitle generator. When you talk while recording a videoclip the transcribed words appear live on-screen. It’s a very useful when you want to create short vlog type videos with automatic subtitles.

Another option is MixCaptions. MixCaptions is a popular app that aims to help make videos accessible to users who regularly watch movies on the mute setting. When watching a movie on the mute setting a transcription provides an increased level of understanding. It’s developed by Mixcord Inc. It’s only available to users of iOS and can be downloaded from the App Store. From the very beginning, the app was produced to assist those using social media services, especially. For example, Mixcord promises to increase Instagram and Facebook viewership by offering the option to add captions to videos. It also promises to boost view time by helping to add subtitles. It currently supports 12 languages.

Another popular choice is the App called Add Subtitles. The straightforwardly titled Add Subtitles app is another great option, but, once again only available for iOS users. Like MixCaptions it promises its users convenience above everything else. The app works by using speech-recognition technology. Once the words being spoken in the video are recognized by the software, it can begin transcribing them to the video. The transcription is done automatically and added to the appropriate timestamps. It also includes an option to download subtitles in over 32 languages.

 

Powerfull websites to add automatic subtitles

Rev.com is a website used by thousands of people to add subtitles to English videos. You upload your video and within 24 hours you get a perfect transcript of the video. You then upload that subtitle file with your video to LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook. And your video is subtitled!

Amberscript.com works in a similar way, but also offers Dutch subtitles. Amberscript’s transcribers are native speakers, so the quality is top notch. If you don’t care about the best results, you can also do it with YouTube. YouTube automatically creates a transcript for each uploaded video. You can change this (commas, capitals…) and then download it. All the above websites work with separate subtitle files. This is a text file in SRT or VTT format for example, which you can upload separately to your video on most social networks. Would you rather burn your subtitles into your video? Then you can merge the subtitle file and your video in, for example, Handbrake.

Computer software to do the job

And of course, you can also subtitle your video in editing software. How it works and the end result depends on the software you’re using. Adobe Premiere and Camtasia, for example, both have a subtitling tool. But, even if you don’t have professional editing software, there are plenty of options to subtitle your video. And that’s really a must these days!