4 Free Online Closed Captioning Platforms and Subtitle Editors
Amara Translation and Subtitling
Amara Non-Profit Project makes video globally accessible with closed captions, subtitles, and translations.
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If you want to create your own captions and subtitles instead of using machine transcription, there are a lot of options out there that won’t break the budget!?
Let's talk about online platform options, which do not require downloads, software updates, or any installation. With these options, you can just log in to a website and start adding captions and subtitles to your video online. Then when you are finished, you can publish or download your results directly from the site.
All of the tools below enable you to add closed captions and subtitles to videos online as caption editors. And a few of them have extra functions like collaborating with other people or directly syncing your captions to streaming services like YouTube. In our review of each captioning tool, you’ll find summaries of the benefits and shortcomings of each one to help you choose the one that suits you best!
Amara is one of the most powerful and intuitive subtitle editors online, and it’s one of the few cloud-based subtitle editors around with a free version still available. Amara’s mission is to help people make more video content accessible by adding subtitles and closed captions to videos.
With Amara’s free subtitle editor, you can start subtitling immediately without having any subtitling experience and you don’t have to watch any kind of tutorial. Unless video tutorials are your thing, in which case we’ve included a short video that demonstrates how to use Amara platform below.
The Amara editor has shortcut keys that are designed to save you time. Amara users are able to synchronize the video while it’s playing by simply pushing the up or down key. No pausing necessary! There are also different playback modes for beginners and experts so that the video plays at a speed that’s comfortable for you.
While you synchronize your subtitles to the video, Amara automatically adds time-codes. Time-codes mark where a caption begins and ends in the runtime of the video, which is important if you need a file with properly formatted time-codes for playback.
For more advanced users, Amara is still great for cutting down manual steps and saving time. In the editor’s sync mode, you can enable subtitle editing and modify time-codes individually or in bulk.
Amara also has a built-in video player that plays your work as you go, so you can watch the video and see the subtitles on the video as they will appear to the final viewer. Seeing the subtitles in the context of the video can help you make decisions about the placement, length, and balance of the lines on the screen.
Another big plus of Amara’s subtitle editor is that after you’re done creating your captions or subtitles, you can set up a direct integration to your YouTube or Vimeo account.?
To start, create an account or log in and go to Amara’s Public Workspace, click the Add Videos button and add the URL of the video that you want to subtitle. The videos that you add to Amara will appear in the Public Workspace so other people can contribute subtitles in their language.
Here’s a two-minute demo of Amara’s subtitle editor:
For anyone who wants to have more than one language for their video, you can easily add a new language on the Amara platform. After the original-language captions are created, you just return to the video page and click Add a new language. After you’ve chosen your language, you will also have the original language subtitles as a reference in the Amara Editor as you translate.
Want to reach more people in more languages? Amara also enables collaborative captioning and translation. Well-known organizations like NOWNESS and Udacity use Amara every day to caption their videos. If you’re using the free version of Amara, volunteer subtitlers can help translate your video into more languages for better localization. Share the link to your video in the Amara Public Workspace with other people to get help creating, translating, and reviewing subtitles. Even if you used a different subtitle editor to create your captions, you can still add your videos and upload captions to Amara, where volunteers can see it.?
Another cool thing about Amara’s free subtitling platform is that they offer technical support to all of their users and host user forums where people can provide suggestions, ask questions, and help each other out.
Sidebar: If you want to be able to manage collaborators or teams or have a private workspace, you can consider using the Amara Enterprise platform. Additionally, if you don’t really want to do the subtitling yourself, you can also use the affordable subtitling service on Amara on Demand and let the professional captioners and translators caption your video and translate it into your target languages.?
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You can export the following subtitle formats. If you need something you don’t see here, just contact Amara’s help team.
If your video was recorded in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish, the YouTube automatic caption generator might save you a lot of time. While the subtitle accuracy is not always great, especially for difficult or amateur audio, the automatic syncing is pretty good.
A drawback of YouTube’s machine-generated captions is that they don’t always give you the option. When you upload your video, YouTube will automatically detect if the video has background music or too much noise. If it finds it, it will not offer you the option to add automatic subtitles because they don’t want you to use the low-quality output for your captions (after all, who needs “craptions?”).
So your best bet with using YouTube’s machine generated captions feature is to stick with videos that have clear audio of the speaker, no background music, and no noise. If your video is in English, YouTube will start the auto-captioning at the time you upload your video. But if your video is in the other languages mentioned above, you can just go to your video editing page > Subtitles or CC > Add new subtitles or CC and follow the prompts to create your subtitles on demand > review and edit your captions before you publish and download it.
The following video demonstrates how to edit and download your captions on YouTube:
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It was difficult to find a smooth workflow to transcribe a video within the Subtitle Horse editor, but it seems like the developers work on making improvements pretty regularly. For the time being, we would recommend starting out with a transcribed text file that you upload if you choose Subtitle Horse for your captioning needs. A transcribed text file captures the speech in a video without the synchronization information, which you can add in Subtitle Horse.
One thing that we liked about Subtitle Horse is that typeface options are available in the interface, so you can add bold or italics without having to know special key combos such as putting asterisks around the text.
If you use Subtitle Horse and don’t have time to complete your project, you have the option to download it as a project file so that you don’t lose your work. All you have to do is add the video URL and upload your project file in the editor to continue working.?
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If you want to edit subtitles on a cloud-based platform but don’t want to upload your video to Youtube, Vimeo, or other third-party video hosting sites, Subly may be a good fit for you. Subly lets you upload videos directly to their platform using an intuitive and user-friendly drag-and-drop function, as well as edit subtitles directly on their online platform.
Like Youtube, they also provide AI-generated automatic captions which automatically transcribe your video and match those captions to the corresponding timeline of your video. You can also use their style editor to style and reposition your captions or subtitles.
What is cool about this tool is that it supports automatic transcriptions for more languages than Youtube, at the time of writing, they provide 31 languages for automatic transcription including English, Japanese, Mandarin, Hebrew and more. I have tried English and Mandarin and they are both decently accurate.
It is very easy to use, and the interface and workflow are very intuitive. Just follow the prompts, upload any video you want to caption or add subtitles, then edit the timeline and captions/subtitles in the interface.
After you finish editing, you can either download the video along with subtitles/captions or just download the SRT or TXT file for future use.
Take note, if you choose to download your video from Subly, there will be a Subly watermark in your video and your subtitles will be burned-in to your video. That means that you won't be able to turn your subtitles off or add multiple subtitle files.
Subly is very cool and can save you a lot of time to get you started on the same language subtitling. However, it does not allow you to collaborate with other captioners and translators to work on team projects or with subtitling and captioning in multiple languages.?
As a result, we recommend you add your video to Amara and utilize our community for multilingual translation and collaborative captioning even if you started your captioning process using this tool. You can also utilize Amara on Demand’s service to help you translate and caption your videos in multiple languages too to make your video accessible for everyone!
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To learn more about free tools and subtitle software, check out the full article!
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1 年Amara requires that the video already be on the net, and Subly (after me wasting two hours to fine tune the subs) wanted $19.00 for me to download it. Not pleased.