Creating an SRT file

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.

1. Open your text editor and go to File and then Save as.
2. On the drop-down menu for file type, select All Files
3. Save the file as YourVideoName.srt
4. In the document, type a 1, then hit Enter
5. 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.
6. add –> and then in the same timestamp format, when you want the caption line to end. Hit Enter.
7. Type the line of the caption. Hit Enter twice.
8. Type a 2, and then repeat for the second line of captions.
9. 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

10. Continue for as many captions as you need for your video, keeping a line break between each caption line.
11. 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).