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Add Subtitles and Captions

Here you can add sub-titles / captions for different languages and for the hearing impaired.

Updated over 2 months ago

Spotlightr can transcribe your videos for you and then add them as captions to your videos. Dozens are languages are supported as the source language. Each account comes with some minutes available and then once used up more are available for purchase.

Or if you have the caption file already you can upload it to your video as well. The caption file will be either an .srt file or .vtt file.

Before we get to the instructions, just a note that the transcription feature is not possible for linked videos. In order for Spotlightr to transcribe your video for you, it is necessary to upload your videos to Spotlightr.
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To access Subtitles & Captions edit an individual video and then navigate to the Player tab and then Captions & Transcripts:

Uploading Captions

To upload your .srt or .vtt file simply click on Uploaded Captions and then click the Add New Language button:

Select the language of the file you are going to upload and then click on the upload icon:

Once the file is added click on Save Language:

Once you have added your file it will display here with a variety of options:

You can click on the Edit icon to edit this language and file. For example, if you uploaded the wrong file for English you can click this and add a new file.

You can click the Remove icon to remove the language and file completely.

Or you can click on the Set Default checkmark to set this language as default. This is useful if you are going to be adding multiple languages to the video.

You can add multiple languages by simply clicking on the Add New Language button and then select a new language and upload a file for that language. In this example I added German as the language. Then just click to upload the German file:

Now that the German file is uploaded just click on Save Language:

Now you'll see the two languages added. You can click on one of the checkmarks to set one of them as the default:

Generate Transcriptions - No Translations

Here we'll review how to generate your transcription only without doing any translations.

To generate the transcription for your video to use as captions, simply click on Generated Transcriptions and switch it on. Once on you will need to then select your Source Language:

Once you choose your Source Language you will also see an options to Translate the transcription as well into other languages. We'll leave that off for now and click on the Save button:

Once you do that you should see it processing:

Once the transcription finishes you can check the accuracy of the transcript right inside of Spotlightr. Just click to Edit the Transcript:

This will launch our powerful editor. No need to download the file, make changes and then upload it again!

To start you can simply click the play button to see how the transcription performed:

If you need to edit the text just edit it on the right side of the editor. And then to adjust the timing you can either enter the numbers directly on the right side or just slide the bars left and right in the timeline under the video. Sliding the bars is the easiest way to do this:

If you do edit the numbers, make sure you don't change the format. The format is 00:00:00.000 with 3 digits at the end representing thousandths of a second. You cannot remove a digit, it must stay in this format.

Generate Transcriptions - With Translations

Step 1: Configure the transcription option

To generate the transcription for your video to use as captions, simply click on Generated Transcriptions and switch it on. Once on you will need to then select your Source Language which is the language that the video audio is in.

Step 2: Configure the translation option

Once you choose your Source Language you will also see an options to Translate Transcription as well into other languages. Turn that switch on and then select 1 or more languages. Here we'll choose Spanish (Spain) and it automatically selects Spanish (USA) as well.

Now click Save:

Once you do that you should see it processing:

Step 3: Review your transcription before translating (optional)

You now have the opportunity to Review your transcription before generating the actual translated version. This is optional.

If you want to review it first, click on the Review button:

This will launch our powerful editor. No need to download the file, make changes and then upload it again!

To start you can simply click the play button to see how the transcription performed:

If you need to edit the text just edit it on the right side of the editor. And then to adjust the timing you can either enter the numbers directly on the right side or just slide the bars left and right in the timeline under the video. Sliding the bars is the easiest way to do this:

If you do edit the numbers, make sure you don't change the format. The format is 00:00:00.000 with 3 digits at the end representing thousandths of a second. You cannot remove a digit, it must stay in this format.

Step 4: Generate the translation(s)

Now to generate the translations simply click on the Translate button:

Theme Settings For Captions

In your Theme there are a variety of options that you can set like appearance, interactive transcripts, and auto-generating your transcriptions. Remember, anything set in your theme will apply to all videos added to a project with that theme applied.

Navigate to the theme applied to your project and click on Theme Advanced Options:

And then Captions, Transcripts & AI:

Auto-Generate Transcripts For All Uploaded Videos

To have every video uploaded get transcribed automatically you just need to set this in the theme applied to your project.

Simply configure your transcription settings as discussed earlier in this article. Once configured and saved, all videos added to a project with this theme will get transcribed (and translated if enabled):

Appearance

In this section you can change the styling of your captions like colors of captions and backgrounds and caption size.

Interactive Transcripts

You can also activate Interactive Transcripts. Interactive Transcripts will allow your viewers to launch a sidebar in the video and search for different portions of the video.

Set Captions to Auto-On For Viewers

You can set the captions to appear automatically on video play so your viewers don't have to turn them on manually. Click on Default Language >> Enable Browser Detected Language.​

Changing Transcription Settings for Individual Uploads

We also provide an option to change your transcription settings when you upload a particular video or videos.

This is useful if you have transcription generation turned on via your theme, but for a particular set of videos you do NOT want them transcribed.

Or if you do not have auto-generating transcriptions set in your theme, you can use this option to turn this on for a particular video or set of videos.

Or another use case would be if you have a set of videos that is being uploaded with a different default language than is set in your theme.

When uploading a video to Spotlightr click on the small icon here:

If you have this option set to ON in your theme, it will automatically be ON here as well. You can opt to turn it off if or just leave on, or change your default language, etc.

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