If you don’t want to pay for captioning, it is possible to create your own captions, in what is called an SRT file. All you need is a basic text editor, such as Notepad.
- Open your text editor and go to File and then Save as.
- On the drop-down menu for file type, select All Files
- Save the file as YourVideoName.srt
- In the document, type a 1, then hit Enter
- Insert the time at which you want the first line of captions to start in HH:MM:SS,sss format (where sss is milliseconds.) Both hours and milliseconds are required.
- add –> and then in the same timestamp format, when you want the caption line to end. Hit Enter.
- Type the line of the caption. Hit Enter twice.
- Type a 2, and then repeat for the second line of captions.
- It should look something like this:1
00:00:00,010 –> 00:00:08,052
Hi. My name is Jennifer Anderson.
This is my proposal for the major project in our literature class.
2
00:00:08,064 –> 00:00:16,057
I would like to do a kind of literary analysis,
multi-genre research paper
- Continue for as many captions as you need for your video, keeping a line break between each caption line.
- You can do basic formatting such as <i>text</i> to make text italicized or bold.
Making an SRT file can take some time, but it isn’t too difficult to do. You can also upload the video to a site such as YouTube and have it create its own captions, then clean them up (YouTube is not 100% accurate, and jargon makes it significantly less accurate).