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How to Add Closed Captioning to a Video
How to Add Closed Captioning to a Video

Add subtitles for multiple languages to your videos

Anthony Karcz avatar
Written by Anthony Karcz
Updated over a week ago

Applies to these roles: Author, Reporter, Admin 

You can quickly add closed captioning and subtitles to any video with Rise. Here’s how. 

Preparing Your Caption Files

Rise supports VTT files generated by third-party captioning services, such as YouTube, Amara, and 3PlayMedia. Here are some tips to make sure your caption files are properly formatted.

  • When entering a timestamp for your caption, use a format of hours:minutes:seconds.milliseconds, with hours, minutes, and seconds having two digits and milliseconds having three. For example: 00:00:05.001 → 00:00:08.200

  • Rise supports bold, italic, and underline formatting in caption files and voice tags to indicate which person is speaking. All other formatting tags will be ignored, such as font and font color. 

  • A caption will automatically wrap if it’s too long to fit on a single line. However, if you need a caption to break at a specific point, add one line break in your caption file in the appropriate place.

  • On the other hand, if you need to split a caption into two separate caption boxes that display simultaneously, add two line breaks in your caption file. You might do this when two people are speaking and you want each speaker’s dialogue to display in its own caption box.

  • If symbols unexpectedly replace some letters or characters in your captions, make sure your caption files are encoded for UTF-8.

  • If your caption files are in SRT format rather than VTT, use a tool like this one to convert your files quickly. 

  • Timestamps must be formatted as hour:minute:second:millisecond, like this: 00:00:00:000

  • Don't add an extra line between the timestamp and its associated caption. For example:

    00:00:02.000 --> 00:00:05.000
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Tip: In a hurry? Create a .VTT file in a snap by uploading your video to YouTube and using their automatic captioning feature (this works on private and public videos). Once captions have been generated, export the .VTT file. Automatic captions are created by machine algorithms and may not be as accurate as a professional captioning service. 

Adding Closed Captioning to a Video

  1. Mouse over a video block or an interactive block with a video (including those in lesson templates) and click the Edit button in the upper left corner of the block.

  2. For the video to which you want to add captions to, click Edit and select Manage captions.

  3. Enter the language you’d like to upload in the Add a New CC File field and select it from the list.

  4. Click Upload CC File and select the corresponding .VTT file. 

  5. Add additional languages by repeating the previous two steps. 

  6. To remove an uploaded file, hover over the language in the list and click the trash icon that appears.

  7. Now, when you or your learners play the video, you can select a caption language from the CC button.

Downloading and Deleting Caption Files

  1. Mouse over a video block or an interactive block with a video (including those in lesson templates) and click the Edit button in the upper left corner of the block.

  2. For the video to which you want to delete or download captions for, click Edit and select Manage Captions.

  3. In the captions list, hover over a language to see the download and delete icons. 

  4. Click the Download icon to download the .VTT file. If the file opens in a new window instead of downloading, right-click the icon and select Save Link As to save it as a file.  

  5. Click the trash can icon to delete the associated caption file.

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