King of video marketing platforms, Wistia allows you to manage your content promotion from A to Z. Its hosting and implementation tools will allow you to create your own marketing channel, and are a favorite among marketers.
But Wistia has also become very committed to the question of digital accessibility. Its video player is specially adapted to an audience with hearing and visual disabilities.
Closed captions are not to be underestimated, and Wistia provides you with many ways to add subtitles to your videos.
As a subtitle specialist, we guide you through the available options and give you a convenient and professional solution to get the job done.
Why add closed captions to your Wistia videos?
A reference marketing video platform, Wistia is the preferred choice of marketers and innovative companies. With its fully customizable hosting tool, video player, call to action and podcast player, it is quick and easy to make your content accessible to a growing audience.
In particular, Wistia has invested heavily in the accessibility of its player, notably by complying with WCAG 2.1 AA standards (thanks to contrast options, voice commands and keyboard shortcuts).
However, to improve the readability and comprehension of your content for everyone, subtitling remains the essential tool. Among other things, it allows you to :
- Open your content to the diversity of languages and nationalities in the world.
- Make your content accessible to the hearing impaired and people with comprehension problems.
- Increase the visual impact of your videos.
- Provide visual support that encourages users to react or discuss your message directly.
As you can see, it would be a shame to do without it! We give you the method to create them easily.
Subtitling Wistia videos: the different processes
Wistia provides many possibilities to create subtitles on your video. This includes notably adding SRT files, which you can generate automatically with the in-built partner tools. You can then obtain subtitles :
- By creating them yourself, from a manual transcription of the audio
- Using an automatic subtitle generator
- By using the services of a captioning professional
For the first choice, we warn you that it is a more complicated job than it seems. Transcription requires a lot of time and very specific skills, which is why it is a profession. There are not thirty ways to subtitle, and you have to know how to follow a certain number of rules.
For the second choice, automatic subtitling solutions make the work easier, but still require human intervention to optimize the result, whether it's time code synchronization or transcription. You can use automatic subtitling on Wistia, but you will have to edit the result by yourself as well.
The third choice allows you to save time by letting an expert take care of it. Wistia also has a professional service, but we present here our professional subtitling solution, Checksub.
Checksub will save you more time as it combines both an automatic generator and collaboration with subtitle experts.
How to generate professional closed captions on Wistia?
As speech-to-text technologies have become widespread, a growing number of subtitling solutions are available on the web. Although they make subtitling work easier and easier, professional solutions remain the most reliable for demanding and high-volume projects.
Here we present our subtitling platform in collaboration with professionals (agencies and freelancers). It integrates useful features:
- An advanced speech recognition API
- A collaborative interface with subtitlers and translators to manage your video project
- An automatic translation engine to translate your video, with 128 different languages available.
- A powerful and easy-to-use online subtitle editor
Here's how you can easily proceed with our subtitling solution.
1# Upload your Wistia video on the interface
To get started, register on the Checksub platform. Select your content and indicate its original language. You can also choose from a wide range of languages to perform a translation if necessary.
You have one hour to test the platform. If this time is not enough for your first video, you can buy credits at a low price.
The API will then perform the speech recognition and provide you with the result in a few minutes.
2# Check and optimize the result
When the result is ready, click on the language of your video and access the dedicated subtitle editor to check the synchronization.
Here are a few tips to optimize this task:
- Cut your sequences into 2 sentences of equal length. It's often easier to divide your text into sentences. Go to the setting button to "divide my text into sentences".
- Arrange the text sequences at the exact moment the speaker starts speaking. If the speaker is speaking fast, you can try to delete a few words but not the beginning or ending words.
- Always display the characters when the speaker's lips move (important for those who read with their lips).
- Be sure to display a subtitle at the beginning of a scene and erase it at the end of the scene.
- Repeat several readings by yourself to check the fluidity of your subtitles.
3# Retrieve and send the SRT file to Wistia
When you are satisfied with the transcript, you can download the TRS file. By adding it to the Wistia interface, your subtitles will appear immediately.
Professional captioning service: Asking for help
As you have noticed, using Checksub by yourself saves a lot of time, but still requires a lot of effort and accuracy. And we are well aware of this!
That's why we put subtitling experts at the heart of the transcription process. So you can easily contact our subtitling service from our interface, if you don't have a lot of time or if you have a big project. Professional subtitlers and translators will then take care of your video projects. Do not hesitate to ask us for more information about closed captions, or else!
How do I put encoded subtitles on my Wistia video?
If you want to customize the formatting of your subtitles, you also have the possibility to encode your subtitles in your video. To do so, you can also use our solution. Just press "Export" > "Export video". You will then have all the tools you need to customize the appearance of your subtitles.
Otherwise, you now know how to properly target your customers with your Wistia videos. We hope this will help you create exciting marketing campaigns!
