Editing your video
Add and Export Captions for Tutorial Videos
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In short
- Turn captions on with the CC button. The first time, ScreenDub times them to the real audio.
- Timing is word accurate, and the spoken word is highlighted as it plays.
- Five styles, plus your own text size and highlight color.
- At export you can skip captions, burn them in, or get a separate subtitle file.
Captions are the on-screen text of your narration. They come from your script, so the words always match the voice, and they are timed to the audio word by word.
Turning captions on
Click CC in the editor toolbar. The first time you switch captions on for a video, ScreenDub listens to the finished narration and works out exactly when each word is spoken. That takes a moment. After that the timings are stored with the project and captions appear instantly.
Because the timing is measured from the real audio rather than estimated, the words land with the voice instead of drifting ahead or behind.
The word highlight
The word being spoken is highlighted as the narration plays, karaoke style. It makes a video easier to follow with the sound off, which is how most people watch in a feed.
Styling captions
Open Customize, go to Edit & Overlay, and find Caption style. There are 5 looks:
- Box. Dark box behind each line. The familiar subtitle look.
- Clean. Text only with a soft shadow. Minimal, stays out of the way.
- Outline. Bold text with a dark edge, like film subtitles.
- Spotlight. The spoken word pops on a highlight chip. Social-video energy.
- Light. White chip with dark text. Crisp over dark screens.
You also set the text size and the highlight color. Leave the color unset and it follows your brand accent. On narrow shapes like Vertical 9:16, long lines shrink to fit rather than running off the edge.
Caption options at export
- Video only. A plain video file with no captions on screen. This is the default.
- Burned-in captions. The captions are baked into the video. They always show, on any player.
- Separate file. You get the video plus a subtitle file. You can add the captions later on a platform like YouTube.
Which to choose
- Use burned-in captions for social feeds, where many people watch with the sound off.
- Use a separate file when the platform can add captions for you.
- Use video only when you do not need captions at all.
If you edit the script
Change the wording of a segment and its captions are worked out again the next time you turn captions on, so they keep matching the new audio. You never have to re-time them yourself.
Next steps
Rebuild a video from scratch in Regenerating a video.
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