How to Add Subtitles to Videos on YouTube

We're gonna show you how to add captions to your videos in both Final Cut and Adobe Premiere, and choose whether you want to bake those captions in, meaning they appear on the video constantly, no matter what, or give your viewers a choice to enable or disable captions. And we're gonna show you how easy it is to grab those transcript files and make those into captions from your Riverside recordings.

You can use the chapters in this video to jump to your video editor of choice. Let's first grab that transcript file from Riverside so we can use it for captions. I'm gonna jump into a Riverside studio here and select view recordings selecting a previous episode. You'll see here. You can download the individual tracks for audio and video and export an entire clip.

Click the edit button in the top right. Once you've chosen your preferred layout, click the export button and you can download up to 4K quality video. And after a few minutes, that file will be available to you back in the dashboard. You can select the full episode and download the clip there. And then to download the transcript for captions, select these three dots at the top and choose either SRT or text.

If you're adding captions, choose SRT and it will download that file. Now that we have our full video file and the SRT captions file, we can jump into Final Cut and put them together. Here in Final Cut, I've created a new project and timeline using the full video from that episode. Now I'm gonna go up to file, import, and choose captions.

Navigate to that file you just downloaded, Select it. The role will be SRT, and you can choose relative to timeline and hit. Once it's imported, you'll see captions have now been added above the video timeline and it even has the speaker label throughout the video. Now you can export this video with the captions baked in, meaning they appear no matter what or where your viewer can choose whether to enable them.

Hit the share button and final cut in the top right and choose export file. If you need help with export formats, we actually have an entire video dedicated to exporting in both Final Cut Compressor, Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media and Coder. You can click that link above for the video or click it in the video description.

We're gonna choose an H 2 64 video, and then we're gonna go over to rolls, and you'll see here that there is a captions roll in the video track. If I click that, I can actually choose to burn in captions. I'll choose the English SRT format and hit okay. And that means when this video exports, the captures will be visible on top of the video no matter what.

They will not be able to be removed or disabled by the viewer if you don't wanna burn them in, but have them as an option. Click none for burn in captions and hit okay. But you'll see that captions will still be included on the file. Export. Now let's go over to Adobe Premiere and see what it looks like to add captions.

Here in Adobe Premiere, I've created a new project and dragged in the same video file. And now I'm going to import the captions file going up to file import, and then I'll navigate to that same SRT file I downloaded from Riverside. Here you'll see the captions as a separate SRT file in the media bin.

Now I can actually just drag this down into the timeline and when I let go of the mouse button, you'll see a new caption track option has appeared. These are subtitles, so you can choose the standard subtitle. For style is none and choose the source time code option. Hit okay and now you'll see the captions have been added right here on top of the video track.

Again, you have several options for exporting this video with the captions. I'm gonna go up and hit export and here you'll see the captions option. You can choose to disable the captions entirely or click this toggle on and like in Final Cut, you can choose to burn the captions into the. Or create that separate SRT file that coincides with the entire sequence you've created here in Premiere.

Another great use case for those SRT files is adding subtitles to your YouTube videos. If you take that same exported video from Riverside and upload it directly to YouTube, you can then upload that SRT file, and YouTube will automatically add those subtitles in the editing window of a video. Here on YouTube, I'm gonna select the subtitles option, and here you can actually upload a.

With or without timing, I'm gonna choose with timing because our transcription was timed with the recording. And then choose that same SRT file we used before. Click upload, and now YouTube will parse all those subtitles with the proper timing directly in your video. Click done. And now you've added subtitles to your video in just a few seconds.

So that's how easy it is to add captions and Final Cut and Adobe Premier, and grabbing that transcription file from your Riverside recordings in the proper SRT.