How To Edit Captions and Subtitles on YouTube

Do your videos have fewer viewers and interactions than expected? You can fix that by adding subtitles to your YouTube videos. You can generate and edit captions on YouTube videos within the app. Our detailed guide will help you do it.

How To Generate Auto-Captions and Subtitles on YouTube

Besides having a library of millions of videos, YouTube offers another helpful feature. YouTube can auto-generate subtitles for your videos. When you upload a video, YouTube generates closed captions that viewers can turn on or off. That is a fantastic free feature, as most viewers lose interest if the video doesn't have subtitles.

However, auto-generated subtitles on YouTube can take a few days to appear, depending on the length of your video or the audio clarity. Moreover, YouTube won't generate auto-captions if your audio isn't clear enough, the speech is in thick accents, or it's challenging to comprehend due to speech overlapping. Additionally, YouTube's auto-captions generator isn't the most accurate subtitle tool.

However, if you want to generate auto-captions on YouTube, follow these steps:

1. Log into your YouTube account.

   

2. Click your profile picture and select YouTube Studio.

   

3. Open the Content section on the left to view your videos. Find the video to which you want to add captions and click the pencil icon.

   

4. The Video Details page will open. Scroll down and click Show More.

   

5. Navigate to Language and Captions Certifications and set your Video Language to English. Click Save in the top-right corner.

   

6. Open the Subtitles section and click Add.

   

7. Now, select the Auto-Sync option to generate auto-subtitles. You can also see other subtitle creation options.

   

8. Your video's automatically generated text and timestamps will appear in the subtitles textbox.

   

9. Click Publish in the upper-right corner.

   

How To Edit Captions and Subtitles on YouTube

As mentioned, YouTube subtitles aren't as accurate as they should be. YouTube's subtitle generator technology still needs improving because the subtitles are often poor and unintelligible. If your video has overlapping speech or thick accents, YouTube won't be able to provide accurate subtitles.

Fortunately, you can always edit YouTube's auto-captions. The process is straightforward, although manually editing incorrect subtitle lines takes time and resembles manually created subtitles. Therefore, editing YouTube's captions lines will take considerable time if you don't use another program to streamline the process.

Here's how to edit captions on YouTube videos:

1. Go to your YouTube Studio, click Content, and select the video you want to edit.

   

2. Click Subtitles in the left sidebar.

   

3. Check if your subtitle says Automatic. Otherwise, YouTube hasn't finished auto-generating subtitles for your video. Once you see Automatic, click Duplicate and Edit.

   

4. Review the transcript and change any incorrect text if necessary. Check the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
5. Click Edit Timings to edit the timestamps if the synchronization is off.

   

6. Once the edits meet your expectations, click Publish in the upper-right corner.

   

Tips and Tricks for Editing Captions on YouTube

Editing YouTube captions can look like manually typing the subtitles yourself. It can be tedious, but it helps ensure your viewers can follow and understand your video. Therefore, we've prepared several tips to help you edit your YouTube captions for the best possible results.

First, ensure all your lines have a maximum of 32 characters. Any characters exceeding that limit won't show on the screen.

Additionally, the subtitles must be grammatically correct. Grammatical correctness always comes before the character count.

Furthermore, you can use the Scrubber tool if you need help with the time placement of caption frames. You can find it below the video to help you with minor changes in timestamps for your caption lines. If you need to add another caption frame, click the +Caption icon.

Lastly, if your video has pauses in speech, you can add a break in the captions to express it. Simply pause your video at the time of the speech break. Then, place your cursor where the speech break is in the captions line, and hit Enter to break the text into two lines. That will create a subtitle break to imitate the speech more precisely.

How To Edit Captions and Subtitles for YouTube Video Like a Pro

YouTube allows creators to generate, edit, and download their captions. However, besides the low accuracy rate, this process can be long and complicated. Therefore, you can try an alternative.

A reliable subtitle editing tool can help you get the best subtitles for your videos and edit them quickly. Wondershare DemoCreator is one of the top subtitle generator and editor tools that can solve your problems with little to no effort. You can automatically generate subtitles, edit and embed them into videos, and share videos to YouTube directly from the program.

However, if you don't need automatically generated subtitles, you can use Wondershare DemoCreator to upload an SRT file to your video. You can also manually type the subtitles for your video in Wondershare DemoCreator, although you won't need to do that.

Moreover, you can customize and adjust your subtitles' text, color, size, font, and placement with a few clicks. You can use some of the 12,000+ trendy caption and subtitle templates to enhance video attractiveness and creativity.

Conclusion

You can use YouTube's auto-captions option to add subtitles to your videos on YouTube. YouTube can auto-generate subtitles for your videos after you post them. You can edit them if they don't meet your expectations. Either way, you can download the subtitles transcript and add it to your video to create open captions.

However, you can try a better solution—Wondershare DemoCreator. It can help you generate and edit subtitles with high accuracy and publish your videos directly from the app.