The need for captions in modern delivery

There are a barrel of 'why video is amazing' for your company over at '37 staggering video marketing statistics for 2018' though I'll save you the dossier, after all, I've run a video marketing company to support you exploiting this opportunity for the past 10 years, so call me bias.

The one I want to focus on is that '85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound' - data pulled from two sites averaging 150 million video views a month.

Anecdotally, walk around your office for everyone browsing LinkedIn (who isn't looking for a new job) or surfing Ted and YouTube - pressing play brings the dreaded pooled office reaction to an anomalous sound, though start running a video near someone with text, they will be glued to it.

And that's why, for all the love, sweat, planning, tears and graft that go into getting top performances, having good lighting, making compelling content and getting all the way to publishing - if you (or those you work with) skip the part where you add captions, it's mostly, generally, a huge, huge waste.

Because people won't start watching. They see images flicking past, they can't hear it, we are auditory creatures, there is no hook.. hook them with words, maybe they turn the sound on, or maybe they will just watch your message on the sneak in a meeting or at their desk - either way, the message gets through!

Personally the team and I use Rev.com like it's going out of fashion, $1 a minute transcripts and captions at the flick of a button - I'm uploading files to dropbox as soon as I've recorded them and logging them in a caption queue, generally I get them back within 20 minutes, from a human! It's incredible.

And how much better is a video with captions? Have a look at the below and click to watch it - you don't even need sound! :p

Crossing Borders

The next step is captions that are translated to match the delivery destination of your audience, I'll go into this later in this series of articles, suffice to say we are very proud to work with Chin Communications for this!

Remember the burn(in) !

The vast majority of videos are watched without sound, so it is imperative we ‘burn in’ on-screen captions to your final videos, meaning they are always on and don't need to be user-selected, which we achieve by sending your audio to Rev.com, having it transcribed and doing a second render of your videos with the caption file overlayed.

This ensures people sitting at work watching your content can read it without having to alert their colleagues they are watching videos by having the sound on!

Lastly, we use compression software to minimise the size of the final video files and upload them to dropbox, YouTube or whichever platform best suits your business. 

Did that all sound overly complicated? It’s the most efficient way we have to make high quality for you.

In short, it takes two to three hours of editing for every one minute of finalized video you see on screen. From two days of filming, we will generally bill three to four days of editing and have this completed six weeks from initial filming.

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Thank you for reading - if you learnt something, please give this article a like, click share and leave a comment!

Check back each Tuesday and Thursday as we move through this series on how you can transform your organisation into a story telling, profit-generating machine!

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Part 1 - How we bake your cake at Bravo Charlie - Initial Gap Analysis

Part 2 - Culture Design Day #1 - Exploration

Part 3 - Researching, Developing and Delivering Your Digital Systems and Marketing Strategy

Part 4 - Customer and Stakeholder Interviews, Competitor and Market Research

Part 5 - Photography - Do you know a good image?

Part 6 - Initial Filming of Staff, Facilities and Customers

Part 7 - How To Leverage Your proud customers

Part 8 - How long does filming take?

Part 9 - Editing; Where the magic happens

Part 10 - Colour Grading - Shaping Emotion & Controlling Communication

Part 11 - High quality audio - everything you need to know for better sound in life

Part 12 - The need for captions in modern delivery

Part 13 - Music, language of the soul

Part 14 - Implementing your New Sales Machine

Part 15 - Making an event out of your launch and generating twice your outlay in sales

Part 16 - How to turn your team into content creators - Culture Design Day #2

Part 17 - How to Achieve High Quality Regular Content Production that Drives Sales

Part 18 - Your total time commitment to go through a Digital Transformation

Part 19 - Translations and a global focus

Part 20 - Efficient Workflows - The Keys To The Content Castle

Part 21 - Turning Your Knowledge Into Sales Tools