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Editing and finishing3 min read

LESSON 123

Subtitles and captions

Text that carries sound to every viewer.

IN THIS LESSON

  1. Two words, two jobs
  2. Open and closed
  3. The SRT format
  4. Practice: writing good subtitles

Two words, two jobs

Subtitles are text versions of the audio, usually the dialogue, either transcribed or translated. Captions also describe other sounds, such as music, effects or a door slamming, which makes them especially important for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. The HTML5 standard puts the difference neatly: subtitles serve viewers who can hear but not understand, as with a foreign language, while captions serve viewers who cannot hear the sound or cannot hear it clearly. Naming conventions vary between countries, so check what your client means.

Open and closed

Open subtitles, also called burned-in or hard subtitles, are part of the picture and cannot be switched off. Closed subtitles and closed captions are stored separately and drawn over the picture by the player, so viewers can choose a language or turn them off, and one video can carry many languages. Making subtitles has three stages: writing the text with exact timings, delivering it to the audience in a suitable format, and displaying it. For live television the writing may be done by stenographers or by automatic speech recognition.

The SRT format

The most common subtitle file on the internet is SubRip, with the extension .srt. It is plain text. Each subtitle is a numbered block: a counter, then the start and end times written as hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds, for example 00:02:16,612 --> 00:02:19,376, then one or more lines of text, then a blank line. The comma, not a full stop, separates seconds from milliseconds. Because it is so simple, almost every player and editor reads it, though it has little control over position or style.

Practice: writing good subtitles

This is working practice. Keep each subtitle to one or two short lines and break lines at natural phrases, not in the middle of a name. Leave it on screen long enough to read comfortably, and do not let it run across a shot change if you can avoid it. Condense rather than transcribe every word when people speak fast. For captions, describe sounds that matter to the story in square brackets. Always watch the finished file against the picture once, start to finish.

Try it today

  1. 01Write an .srt file by hand for 30 seconds of your own video.
  2. 02Load it in a media player and check the timing.
  3. 03Burn the same subtitles into a copy and compare.
  4. 04Add two sound descriptions in brackets to make it a caption file.
  5. 05Ask a friend to watch muted and tell you what they missed.