Subtitles & Captions

Captions are a formatting problem as much as a transcription one. A perfect transcript still makes bad subtitles if the lines run too long, the timing drifts, or the reading speed outpaces the viewer. This section covers subtitle and caption work end to end: exporting SRT and VTT files, adding captions to YouTube, setting a sensible maximum characters per line and caption duration, and the accessibility standards that shape those choices. Expect practical guides on captioning video for social, fixing timing after a re-edit, choosing between burned-in and sidecar captions, and writing captions that genuinely serve deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers rather than just satisfying an algorithm. If you publish video regularly, most of this becomes a checklist you set up once and reuse — which is the point.