The Secretly Magical Video Caption App You Should Be Using
Adding captions to your video content can be a painstaking and slow process. Making sure you’ve caught exactly what’s been said, having to relisten to your own voice over and over to get the syntax right, and knowing when to switch to the next sentence can be difficult and frustrating. Lucky for you, SHE Media’s VP of Video and video-editor extraordinaire Reshma Gopaldas let us in on an industry “secret” – there’s an app that will create your captions for you, and it’s called Instagram Threads!
Threads has other functions and capabilities, including direct messaging with friends and camera-first features, but Reshma likes it for captioning clips as well:
“As someone who is creating videos all day, every day for work and personally, I’ve been looking for an easy way to caption videos. Most people watch without sound, so in order to really hook an audience in the first 3 seconds, captions are extremely important. Apple has Clips that live captions, but until now there was no free option to caption any video.”
To get started on Threads and to say good-bye to captioning headaches for good (that’s a real thing, I can attest), read on for a step-by-step breakdown on how to use the app.
How to Caption a Video in Threads:
1) Open up the app and select the clip you’d like to add captions to. Import that clip to the platform.
2) Once your clip has been uploaded, you can start making the magic happen. Click the audio transcribe button and your captions will populate themselves. Depending on the length of your clip, this can take a few seconds – but the results are worth the wait.
3) Now your audio is transcribed, but you still need to edit it! Simply click on the text, and you’ll see a list of tools and features populate on the right side of your screen that will allow you to make changes big or small.
.4) Double-check your work. Be sure to watch the clip through to make sure nothing populated incorrectly and watch out for spelling mistakes! There’s also a very cool bleep out function in case you want to keep your content family-friendly, or if you just need to remove a phrase or word from the clip.
5) You’re all set! Much like on Instagram stories or a TikTok video, you can choose where on the screen your text will fall, resize it, etc. All that’s left to do is hit the bottom right icon of the downwards arrow to save to your camera roll.
Here’s an example of what your finished product could look like, made by Reshma!
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