I’m sure you’ve seen those videos – the ones with the bold and punchy captions flashing across the screen – and I’m sure you’re curious about how to get them on your videos.
Well, it’s super easy!
Captions are a pretty important part of your content distribution strategy. You see, most people start by watching social videos on mute. If they don’t have any context as to what the video is saying, then they’ll keep scrolling.
However, If you have some captions flashing up on the screen – you’re more likely to retain the viewer for longer and pull them into the context of the video.
So you’ve finished up your video, and it’s all ready to go. Just follow these simple steps and throw some captions on your vid before you post it.
1. Download the app. Go to your app store and search “captions”. Select the app with that same name and download it. There are definitely a bunch of options out there, but this step by step process will be applicable to the one called “Captions: For Talking Videos”
2. Open the app and hit “Create”. Select the video from your phone’s album that you’d like to have captions on and away you go. You’re going to hit “import” in the top left to access this option.
3. Start the process. Once your video pops up, hit “done”, and then “continue with one item”, then “proceed with English”.
4. Choose your template and style. You can do this along the bottom of the window. There’s a lot of options, and you can get pretty custom with these. Pick the one that works for you, and make sure it’s something that stands out from the background of the rest of the video.
You can also resize and move around the words with your two thumbs. Move it around until it looks good and then leave it be. Remember to leave a little bit of spacing on the sides – as Instagram shrinks your uploads a little bit – and also don’t put the captions too close to the bottom of the screen.
When the video is playing as a reel, sometimes the words can get lost in the other writing on the screen (ie. likes, comments, descriptions, etc.)
5. Edit the Captions. While AI has become a powerful tool in many instances, there are times when it’s a complete idiot. So, you’ll want to go through and edit the words that it gets wrong – which surprisingly is usually a lot of them.
6. Hit “Export” in the top right. You’re going to export this video at 30fps, and select “Export to Camera Roll”. The video will take its time exporting, and then you’ll select “View in Camera Roll”.
7. Make a Thumbnail. Once your video is open in the album on your phone, scrub through it until you have a nice shot of your face, landing on a word or two in the captions that sums up the video as a whole. You’ll take a screenshot by hitting the screen lock button and volume button at the same time if you’re on an iPhone.
Click on the screen shot you’ve just taken, and crop out the black bars on the top and bottoms of the image. This will be your thumb when you upload the video.
And that’s all there is to it! This is exactly how you put captions on your videos. Using captions is a great way to make your content more accessible for the hearing impaired, or to give your viewers a better idea of what you’re talking about before they decide to unmute.
If you ever need a hand with this, you know who to call.
To Your Success,
Jay Ashcroft
four32 MEDIA