Creating Closed Captioned Content

This is a guide to generating a closed caption video, in which the captions are embedded into the video (i.e., they cannot be turned off). I learned almost all of these steps the hard way.

• Start a Zoom meeting and hit record, and the option to save the video to your computer.
• Do not attempt to record the full thing in one sitting 😭. This is my greatest regret. It will never be perfect, but if you opt for recording in segments, you can get really close.
• Once you’re done recording, move those recordings into iMovie and rearrange however you’d like. You can speed up certain clips by a custom amount (like, 120% faster), which will make your voice high pitched, and you can check a box that says “Preserve Pitch” to remove that effect.
• Upload the video to YouTube.
• Wait for the English (Automatic) captions to be generated. This took multiple hours for a 15 minute video, so it’s worth planning for.
• You can check to see whether the captions are finished by clicking “Your Videos” on the left of youtube.com, and “Subtitles” on the left-hand side menu, and then using the drop down under “Languages”. If “English (Automatic)” appears, the captions are generated.
• Click “Duplicate and Edit” to edit the text; you’ll have to do this since it doesn’t generate punctuation.
• Now it’s time to download the video with embedded captions! To do this, download 4K Video Downloader. This will let you download a YouTube video from a link with the captions burned in.
• Once downloaded and open, click “4K Video Downloader” in the upper left, and then “Preferences”. Check the box that says “Embed subtitles in video file if possible”.
• Now! You can paste the YouTube link into the 4K Video Downloader app, and submit the file.

Hope this saves someone time,

Divya