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3 minute read
2 Nov 2023

How to Make Subtitles for a YouTube Video

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Automatic subtitles

Have you recorded a nice video that you want to share with millions? Thought of uploading it on YouTube? That’s great! But did you know that having subtitles or a transcript can seriously boost the potential reach of your videos?

This happens for a reason. Search engines – such as Google – use crawlers to find content online. These crawlers can only understand text, so providing your video with subtitles or a full transcript of your content can bring your work to light. In this blog post, there is everything you need to know about how to add subtitles to a YouTube video. Let’s start!

4 Ways to Add Subtitles to a YouTube Video

  1. Generate them automatically on YouTube
  2. Create subtitles manually, then upload an SRT file on YouTube
  3. Create them automatically with Amberscript, then upload them on YouTube
  4. Hardcode the existing subtitles into your video, then upload the video on YouTube

Let’s get started and discuss each of them.

1 YouTube Can Automatically Generate Subtitles for You.

  • First, you need to upload a video on YouTube
  • Log in to your account → Create a video or a post → Upload a video file
  • Go to your channel (or YouTube Studio) → Select your video → Go to Advanced Settings
  • Choose a video language
  • By default the subtitles will be auto-generated, you just need to click on CC button to turn them on when you watch the video

P.s. if you click on properties, you can also edit those subtitles in Classic Studio, but their accuracy is far from perfect, so you’ll have to dedicate a lot of time to it.

2 You Can Create Subtitles Yourself and Upload Them on Youtube

  • You can use any text editor for this, including notepad. Just be prepared to spend 4 minutes for captioning each minute of your video. (in other words, an hour-long movie will take 4 hours to caption). If you have a lot of time and patience to do it, check out this article on how to add subtitles to both the video and audio players for some tips.
  • Go to your channel (or YouTube Studio) → Select your video → Go to Advanced Settings
  • Upload your subtitles/cc → With timing
  • Done

3 How to Create Subtitles with Amberscript in 5 minutes

  • Learn how to create very accurate subtitles with our tool and make final -adjustments in our intuitive editor. Our engines can reach up to 90% accuracy, leaving you with small adjustments to make.
  • After you have done that, export your document in SRT format
  • Go to your channel (or YouTube Studio) → Select your video → Go to Advanced Settings
  • Upload your subtitles/cc → With timing
  • Voila!

P.s. all of your files exported from Amberscript include timestamps, so make sure to select “with timing”. If you select “without timing” your subtitles will lose their specific time codes and will be spread evenly across the whole video.

4 You Can Also Burn in Subtitles into Your Video and Then Upload it on YouTube.

That’s not something we’d recommend, but if it benefits your content – there is an easy way to do it.

  • Create subtitles using any method described above (automatically or manually)
  • Download a free video transcoder, such as HandBrake
  • Install the software and open it
  • Upload your video file
  • Go to subtitles tab → Import SRT
  • Choose the correct source → Press “Burn in”
  • Click on “Save as” → Choose a location and a name for your file
  • Press “Start Encode” and wait for your video to be exported
  • There you have it, now subtitles are merged into your video
  • Now you can upload it on YouTube

Here we are at the end! You should by now know how to add subtitles to a youtube video! We are certain that subtitles can be very beneficial for your video content.

If you want to know more about subtitles you might also want to read:

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