Subtitling software
What software should I use to make subtitles?

Subtitles are not only useful in a DVD for a movie, they are also useful for advertisements or your content strategy.

Here are why you need to subtitle:

• Accessibility: Subtitles allow deaf and hearing-impaired people to access audiovisual content (for instance, about 6 million people in France are concerned). Subtitles also allow people who cannot activate the sound of videos (e.g. in transport, in a co-working space, near a sleeping child...) to be able to watch videos in silent mode. They are also a solution to counter autoplay (on social networks, videos are automatically played without sound).

• SEO: subtitles promote natural referencing. Subtitles, being text, are detectable by search engines that will use them to index your video. Good advice: you must therefore place your keywords in your subtitles so that they are well identified and your video is better referenced.

• Engagement: video subtitles catch the user's eye when they scroll through their feed, so if you add subtitles, there's a better chance that people will stop to watch your video. Furthermore, we see that adding subtitles to a video provides 12% of additional visibility. From there, we also see an increase in engagement rate with more shares, comments and likes under a video, from the viewers. By the way, subtitling is starting to arrive in the advertising world, especially on social networks.

There are many software programs available to allow you to subtitle. There is offline software and online software. All of them are tools that allow you to facilitate the subtitling process and/or to embed subtitles directly into a video.

We have selected 2 different solutions for you: an editing software and an online tool. We will also look at the advantages and disadvantages for each one.

Premiere Pro editing software

PremierePro is a video editing software. You can edit your video and create subtitles at the same time. However, this will require you to write each subtitle line by hand. And then you have to layer the frames, subtitle by subtitle on the timeline. A software like PremierePro requires a technical handling which is not always easy. But it's handy when you need to create subtitles but don't have Internet access.

Capté the online tool

Capté is an online tool made in France. The best tool in France on the subtitling market. Like most software, Capté uses a voice recognition system to automatically transcribe the words of your videos into subtitles. This is done in just a few steps: you upload your video, the voice recognition system transcribes the audio into sequences, which are automatically matched to the shots in your video. Then you have to do a little editing to correct any mistakes that may have been written and you can also change the style of your subtitles (typography, color, background...). Once the editing work is done, you can upload your video with embedded subtitles or the .srt file. What's great about Capté is that the tool is available on all operating systems (android, windows, ios...). Indeed, the tool is a web application accessible from getcapte.com and it is responsive for use from your mobile, your pc or your tablet.

For translate videoyou can do dubbing just like on TV or in movies at the cinema. However, this solution is expensive (you have to pay the actors, studio fees...), so subtitling is preferred. What's also interesting about subtitling is that you can integrate several subtitle tracks into the same video. Thus, several languages can be offered for a video and the user himself chooses which track he wants.

To translate a video using subtitles, you first need to transcribe the audio into text. Then, you may decide to do the translation yourself by hand but you may not have the level. We therefore advise you to use an automatic translator such as Deepl (better than Google translation) and a dictionary (online Wordreference is very good). But doing it this way can be rather time consuming because you do everything by hand. 

We therefore suggest you use the Captured tool seen above. Capture offers in addition to the automatic transcription...machine translation. This translation is done using tools such as Deepl. Be careful, however, to reread the translation made by the tool to correct some mistakes that could have been made. The machine is not perfect, it needs human intelligence to be perfect. Capté offers different offers with variable prices. For machine translation, you have to choose the premium offer at 49€/month, the other offers do not include this feature. Among the offers, there is a free package that allows you to create unlimited subtitles, however there will be a watermark Captured during the import so in this case you may prefer an import in .SRT format.

A file SRT is a subtitle file that integrates the text and timestamp data of the subtitle tracks. It also numbers each subtitle sequence to know the display order. This format is one of the most used, especially in DVDs. This type of file is accepted by most video players. To use it in a VLC player, you just need to name the .srt file the same as your mp4 file, then open it with the player and drag and drop the .srt file on it, it's that easy! There are many other ways to do this and you will not have any trouble finding YouTube tutorials on it.

Capté allows you to download your subtitles in this format. And thanks to translation, it allows you to offer a different language choice to your audience and to broaden the audience for your audiovisual content internationally. By uploading your file in .SRT format, you also avoid having a Capté watermark on your video. And you can even use the Capté .srt file, integrate it into PremierePro and play with the subtitle tracks to make videos like Brut does with subtitles that are part of the video.

As explained above, you can use an external subtitle file such as .SRT when you want a translation of your video. Indeed, you have the possibility to download several subtitle files on the same video. Thus, the user can choose the subtitle track of his choice.

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