Amateur filmmakers say all kinds of weird things. Like, a combo of cameras, lenses, lighting, and a pro microphone that costs more than their phone makes a great video! Ask a professional editor the same question, and you might get a completely different answer. The devil’s in the details, as always. Even words on the screen- I mean, their format, color, and size can make or break a video. All jokes aside.
Subtitles are a perfect example of those details, actually. They’re easy to overlook and surprisingly easy to get wrong. Learning to add subtitles to video using an accessible online platform, akin to Clideo, is a great start. But transcribing speech is step one. Timing, typography, placement, accuracy, and even punctuation are most important here.
Subtitles Are Part of the Editing, Not an Afterthought
Many of us watch videos on public transport, at work, or in other places where listening is not always an option. Enter, subtitles! Surely, they have other uses than just transcribing. Of course, subtitles aren’t useful only when the sound is off. For one, unfamiliar accents can ruin my day, understanding technical terminology can be hard, and catching dialogue in noisy environments is no picnic. Not to mention, for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, accurate captions are an important accessibility feature.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) explains that accessible captions should convey spoken dialogue and meaningful non-speech audio information. That may include identifying speakers or describing sounds that contribute to understanding the scene.
Good subtitling is therefore both a technical task and an editorial decision. The goal is to help the audience understand what’s happening without distracting them from the footage.
The AI Shortcut: Not Quite Magic
I know, I know, transcribing a ten-minute interview by hand no one’s idea of a fun afternoon. Fortunately, automatic speech recognition did us all a huge favor.
- Clideo offers browser-based video editing and subtitle generation, allowing users to upload footage and create subtitles automatically from spoken audio.
- Its video editor also supports manual transcription and importing existing SRT subtitle files.
The process is not rocket science. Follow along:
- Upload a video or audio file to Clideo and add it to the editor’s timeline.
- Open the Subtitles section and choose automatic subtitle generation.
- Select the language spoken in the recording and generate the subtitles.
- Review the resulting transcription, correcting words, punctuation, and timing.
- Customize the subtitle appearance and export the finished video.
NOTE: You need a registered account for automatic generation, and the platform uses credits, so you should check the applicable plan before processing longer recordings.
Clideo also offers us subtitle translation, useful for travel videos, international interviews, and content intended for audiences speaking different languages.
However, AI transcription should be treated as a first draft rather than a finished product.
Let’s look at Bob. Bob is a travel vlogger describing a visit to a restaurant with an unfamiliar name while traffic roars behind them.
- Speech recognition software might produce a perfectly readable sentence containing the completely wrong restaurant name.
- Even YouTube’s official guidance warns that automatic captions can misrepresent speech because of accents, dialects, background noise, and pronunciation. Review and edit, people. Review and edit.
- Clideo also backs this opinion. The platform says to use clear audio with minimal background noise and avoid overlapping speech for better automatic transcription results.
The practical lesson? Let AI do the boring, repetitive work, but don’t outsource your judgment.
Typography, Timing, and the Art of Not Annoying Your Audience
Ok, so the words are correct now, the next challenge is making them pleasant to read.
Here are a few things to consider, without having to acquire a graphic design degree.
- Timing: Subtitles should appear in synchronization with the speech they represent. Text that arrives too early can ruin a punchline or reveal information before the speaker does. Text that arrives late forces viewers to choose between listening and reading.
- Length: A complete paragraph occupying the bottom third of a smartphone screen is difficult to follow. Breaking speech into manageable segments makes it easier to read while still watching the action. Ideally, line breaks should also respect the structure of the sentence rather than splitting closely connected words.
- Contrast: White text against a bright sky isn’t helping anyone. You need a dark outline or shadow to improve legibility, because font color might not be the best option 100% of the time.
- Placement: Subtitles need to coexist with the rest of the composition. They shouldn’t cover a product being demonstrated, someone’s face, or an important visual detail. Creators should also consider where social platforms place their interface elements.
- Consistency: Constantly changing fonts, colors, and sizes may look energetic for a few seconds, but it can become exhausting. A consistent visual style generally makes longer videos easier to follow.
Clideo provides controls for subtitle fonts, colors, background transparency, positioning, and timing. Within its video editor, subtitles appear on dedicated tracks, allowing creators to adjust their presentation alongside the rest of the project.
Its subtitle tools also allow users to download SRT or TXT files, which can be useful when preserving a transcript or preparing subtitles for another workflow.
NOTE: subtitles embedded in videos exported from Clideo are hard-coded, meaning they become part of the picture and cannot be switched off in a media player. This can be convenient for videos intended to display text consistently, but it’s less flexible than providing optional closed-caption tracks.
For creators who require selectable captions, keeping a separate subtitle file is a sensible precaution.
The Final Test: Watch Your Video Like a Stranger
Before publishing, there is a simple method to check subtitles: Do not watch a video like the creator.
You have already heard the dialogue several times during the editing process. You can tell what’s going on, recall all of the sentences, and can predict all of the jokes. Your audience doesn’t have any of those benefits.
- To start, play the completed video (no audio).
- Are you able to follow the speaker?
- Do any subtitles disappear before you have finished reading them?
- Is there some important information in the text?
- Then watch it with the sound turned on. Take note of synchronization issues, shoddy sentence cuts and instances where subtitles cross-overs come up with information too soon.
- Last but not least, give a smartphone viewing a go. The style of your subtitle may seem stunning on a 27″ monitor but it may be too small on a smaller screen.
- In cases of translated content, it is recommended to review by another person who is proficient in the target language. A grammatically correct translation can still miss humor, cultural references, or the speaker’s intended meaning.
The following checks do not involve costly equipment. Indeed, this is the point where browser-based editing tools like Clideo come in handy: creators can perform basic transcription tasks, correct, style and export without any complex production setup on their desktop.
Today, you can get a lot of detail from a camera, and transitions that were unimaginable a generation ago can be created using editing software. But neither assures viewers that they will comprehend the final video.
In some cases, it’s not a particularly glamorous thing: making sure the words are accurate, readable, and come at the right time.
It’s not just the text on the screen. It’s editing.
