Video Captions

Part of my workflow for each episode of STEAM Powered is to create one-minute-long video clips for promotion on social-media[1].

Due to time constraints, I only did this on Facebook Creator Studio because it offered the caption auto-generation feature. However, the UI for this is buggy and fills my rage bar, but now that I've started doing captions, I don't want to stop.

So I am now using the Google Cloud Speech To Text API to generate the subtitles. The API offers 60 minutes of audio processing per month for free before billing kicks in, which is well within my requirements at this time. And having a separate asset also allows me to add captions to the videos on Twitter and Instagram as well.

SRT from YouTube videos

If your videos are up on YouTube and and have closed captions enabled, you can find an online or downloadable tool that will fetch the SRTs. You'll still need to edit it for typos if you want accuracy. YMMV.

I won't recommend the one I used because it had questionable popups, but there are several free options available.

Related Posts

• Generate SRT files with Google Cloud Services

  December 4, 2020

• Convert DeepGram to autoEdit transcript format

  November 2, 2022

• Convert DeepGram to Descript transcript format

  January 1, 2023

External Links

• BBC Subtitle Guidelines

1. One-minute long because that's the maximum length video you can upload to Instagram[2].
2. While writing the previous annotation, I found a thing suggesting that you split the videos into 60-second segments and share it to Instagram as a slide-show. This is actually quite helpful to know, and isn't that much extra work to create the extra segmented videos just for Instagram, but still annoying to have to do[3].
3. As it is I have to create separate assets of different dimensions because each platform has different preferences.