I believe however, video shouldn’t be the only means for communicating information. It uses a lot of data and it’s temporal – making it harder for people to skim. I personally, avoid resources which involve watching videos.
Capture
There are multiple methods of capture available, depending on your device. Mobile phones are convenient and of ever-increasing quality. Web cams are also useful as they make it easy to have a stable position. Video specific cameras will give the best video quality, but are also expensive and often bulky.
This is an open source screen capture program, which allows both recording and livestreaming using multiple inputs. So I can place a capture from my webcam over the screen. I can also crop and resize the capture, or make certain colours invisible. This would work better if I had a green screen but you can get the idea with this silly video I made here.
Editing in OpenShot
The result!
Captioning
Editing captions within YouTube
For short videos in particular, it’s easier to just work within YouTube.
On the Advanced page within YouTube’s editor, you must first select the language of the video.
Where captions are available, there is a link in a grey box, as here.
If there are no links here, click the UPLOAD SUBTITLES link to upload your own. The process for making new subtitles is in the next section.
Once you have a subtitle file, editing them in YouTube is fairly easy.
When playing through, hitting the enter key can break a subtitle into two screens at the point where the time slider is placed in the video.
When an incorrect subtitle is noticed, as it is in the image below, it’s a simple matter to fix.
Simply select the text in the subtitle box, in this case it’s the word ‘Tricky”. Then type the correct word, in this case “checking”. Clicking out of the box commits the change to the video.
Once all the subtitles are edited, click ‘Save changes’ in the top right hand corner and confirm by clicking ‘Publish’.
When YouTube Won’t Auto Generate
Sometimes, if your audio is distorted, YouTube won’t auto generate the captions. In those cases, I go straight to Aegisub. Firstly I import the video.
Then I switch the view to Audio and Subtitles only.
Once that is complete the interface is a lot cleaner.
In here, sections of audio can be selected by dragging or specifying a number in the box beside the subtitle. New subtitles are added by right clicking and selecting ‘Insert (after)’.
Once the subtitles are complete, they can be exported into various file types through the File tab.
To use the subtitles on YouTube, select the .srt (SubRip) file extension.
Susannah Bourke 