#captioning guide

So you wanna help GaLm? Then this is the post for you!

Close captioning takes a lot of time and work, so don’t worry if you can’t caption an entire video. This is why this blog is here, to help people collaborate.

Here’s how to get started:

Option 1: Captioning in YouTube’s program (must be on a computer! It does not work on your phone):

Pick a video to caption and click on it. Go to the ‘settings’ button down in the right-hand corner.

Click “Subtitles/CC”. It should bring you over to a new menu.

If there are already captions made for the video, it will say “on”. But if there are no captions, an option will say ‘Add Subtitles/CC”

You must be logged into a Google account so your progress can be saved.

A new tab will open, showing a mini-screen of the video with an option to choose a language. Pick the language you are going to be captioning in.

(skip to ‘how to add Captions to the video’)

Option 2: Captioning in a word processor like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or Pages: ****I prefer this way, as it’s faster.

Open your word processor and the video. I make each a new window and fit both on my screen, but you could also pull the video up on your phone and type on your computer.

OPTIONAL: You can find the auto-generated captions of the video by going to the video and clicking on the “... More” button just under GaLm’s subscribed button. Then click on transcripts, and there you go. Copy those if you want to start working from there. 

Listen to the video and type what you hear, just getting the words down. I press enter for a new sound, a natural break in speaking, or a new voice talking.

Continue until you’re done, or you’re sick of captioning for the day :)

Don’t worry about formatting, since you’re going to have to put it YouTube’s program anyways.

Click here to learn how to ‘Add Captions to Videos’.

How to add Captions to the Video

YouTube’s program is pretty simple, but here are a few tips on how to caption:

Make sure the little box under the video preview is checked. It says ‘Pause video when typing’. This means once you start typing out a caption into the box, the video will pause.

To the left of the video is a text box with a blue plus “+” next to it. That is where you put a new line of captions to add it to the video.

Underneath that is your current captions with their timestamps on the left, start and end dates. You can click on one of these to edit the caption if you want.

Underneath the video preview is the sound profile with a little red marker on it. That marker shows your current place in the video, as well as where the next caption is going to be. 

Make sure that little red line is AFTER the previous caption, or your caption isn’t going to go in the right spot.

If the caption shows up too early or late, you can drag it around to line up with the proper words (but you can’t shuffle captions around so if it is out of order  you need to delete something). 

If you need the caption to be on screen for more or less time, drag the blue edges of the caption box under the video.

Clicking on a caption when the video is playing, changing the time on the video, or dragging the red marker back will start the video playing at that spot. It’s very helpful if you want to listen to something again.

Formatting

A lot of us (hopefully) are going to be captioning, so it would be nice if there was a more uniform look to the captions. (Examples are from my starting captions of GaLm’s No Man’s Sky, #1)

Perhaps the most important thing is making sure no more than two lines of text are present on the video screen at once. Don’t cover the content and make your captions really obnoxious! Viewers have the option of making the captions bigger if they need to, so they don’t want to be greeted by a huge wall of text. You might have to break down the captions into smaller chunks, but it’s worth it.

Spoken words are within quotations, always. 

“Okay, I’m not on a lava-hell planet!” 

If there is a natural break in speaking, make another caption.

“I like the simplicity of this particular intro. It’s just like ‘oh, here’s... white background, ‘No Man’s Sky’...”

“Oh?”

Use brackets to show a break such as sound, or a pause. Most often, I use it for laughter. I put the breaks on a separate, short caption. 

“So where am I going to get placed? This is going really far.”

[Laughter] 

“We’re going really far into the universe- or the galaxy.”

You can also use brackets for emotions or descriptions of his voice like this:

“Now, are we gonna get... an absolutely crazy world?” [His voice lowers] “...or are bad things going to happen?”

Use single quotations if something is being quoted, said in a mocking/sarcastic tone, or mispronounced. Also use it for titles of games:

We're going to be playing 'No Man's Sky',  uh... ignore the fact that 'Destiny' music is playing in the background.

A new speaker is introduced outside of the quotation marks:

A robot voice says: “Commencing Atlas assistance suit initialization”

Short pauses are denotated by ellipses:

“Alright... press square to initialize.” 

Longer pauses use a break:

“Alright... press square to initialize.” 

[A pause] 

“Oh, I have to hold it.” 

Use a dash to indicate a sudden switch in topic or an interruption:

I’m actually sad that I wasn’t able to get it- I mean, I have it on PC, but it’s not coming out on PC until August 12th.

On to punctuation!

Punctuation goes inside of the quotation marks. 

If something is being quoted in single quotations and double quotations, do this:

“Yeah, I have ‘No Man’s Sky’.” <- Do you see how the period is in between the different sets of quotations? It’s easier to read that way.

Anything inside a bracket does not get punctuation.

It’s [Laughter], not [Laughter.] or [Laughter].

If you do NOT want to format: