Last updated on June 5th, 2024
TRANSCRIPT
Manual captions on YouTube can really help your channel improve because YouTube looks for as many clues as possible in deciding how to rank your video. And Rev.com is a great service to get captions made.
Try Rev Max today and get 14 days free (Affiliate Link).
Hear our interview with Rev CEO and founder, Jason Chicola.
I spend hundreds of dollars with Rev every month because I want to make sure I have captions for my videos. I want to make sure that I’ve transcribed my podcasts, and I have an affiliate relationship with them, so any clicks you send to http://tryit.today/rev, I can get some sort of commission. Maybe it’s a lot of money or maybe it’s nothing. It depends on what you do, but if you click that, you will get a $10 discount on your first order if it’s over $10.
Let’s start with YouTube captions. There are a number of ways to do it. You can upload the entire video. So you might do that if the video is not online anywhere yet. I always believe it’s best to have captions for YouTube on the very moment, the very second you launch because YouTube starts ranking a video upon publishing.
“Manual captions can really help because YouTube looks for as many clues as possible to help rank your video.” – Jason Chicola, Rev Founder.
So the quicker you have those captions done, the better because if you upload them a week, a month later, they might help, but they’re not going to be as helpful for YouTube as if you launch it with the captions on.
There’s another way if you’ve uploaded it as unlisted to YouTube. You can also just give the URL there, or you can even have it in a Dropbox, and that would work fine. Now, there’s some other ways to do it. If you upload as unlisted on your YouTube account and connect these accounts, then not only will Rev transcribe it for you, but it will upload it to that file on YouTube, and it will be already set to go. This is my favorite option. I’m going to do that now and show you how to connect your YouTube account or multiple accounts to Rev.
First you click on YouTube, and I already have a couple of accounts connected, but I’m going to add another account. You choose which of your channels that you’re managing. You want to add to Rev. Rev wants access to your account. Make sure you trust Rev, and I’ve worked with them for a long time, and I really do trust them. You click Allow. Now my account VidAction.tv is connected to Rev, and what you can see is happening here is you can select a file to caption.
“You want to upload captions to your YouTube video before you publishfor the best ranking.” – Jason Chicola, Rev Founder.
What you can see now is it shows my most recent videos, some of which are already published and captioned, and some are not. You can see the CC here. They’re already captioned. Some don’t even have thumbnails on. This one has a thumbnail but has not been captioned yet. Now on this particular account, I manage two different YouTube accounts that I pay for having captions made, but I want to make sure I select the right one or you can add more accounts here.
This video is from the VidAction.tv account, and I select this video to add to my cart. Now, it’s telling me this video is seven minutes long. If it’s any time above the previous minute, if it’s six minutes and one second, it will cost seven minutes or seven dollars. I can add more videos or I can just do this one video.
This was where you click to have more videos, or if I really really need it fast, I could click to rush the order. Or if I needed subtitles I can order them here, but I’m happy with just English subtitles. Now, it says here automatically deliver files back to YouTube. I do want that. You don’t have to have that, but I do want that which means that they will be uploaded directly to my YouTube video, and I won’t have to do anything.
Now, here, this is the key information. By default it’s SRT, and that’s just simply the file name that YouTube uses. Generally I also do a TXT file, but I don’t need it right now. I could select it or I could get it later, but generally I will just download it later as a TXT file. Just because you’re ordering it in one fashion here doesn’t mean you are excluded from getting others. You do want to cater your order to what you’re looking for initially.
Now there’s other optional information, so I’m calling this video viral video Nike, right? All right. I can just check out. Okay, my order is confirmed here. I can also add other things here. I can add a glossary, add a script, add speaker names. I don’t have a script. They would use that to adjust what was on the time code in general and make sure that it’s spelled correctly. I don’t have that script. I do have some words I’d like to add to a glossary. I’m the only person in this video, so I don’t need speaker names. In general, I don’t want speaker names. I just want the words to be represented. I don’t need it to be identified who the speakers are. Okay, here’s my glossary. I can revert to other glossaries, or I can create a new glossary. You just enter a word, and you hit return. I want to make sure they spell my name right. I like capitals of my business name, and I like YouTube to be spelled a certain way. There’s not that many difficult words in here, but if I remember certain difficult words, I will add them so that they can make sure and get them right.
“You want to use MANUAL CAPTIONS, becauseYouTube’s automated captions could spell the key words wrong.” – Jason Chicola, Rev Founder.
Now there’s an area down here to notify team members. This is where you have the team members that normally should get all transcripts and captions from your videos. It’s not. It’s a very specific one. Then you can also place another order or you can go to my files.
Now, let’s go to “My Files.” As you can see, I do a lot of transcripts here. Each one has the name of the file essentially here. I often have long names on my files.
Now, let’s talk about the types of things I’m transcribing or captioning. This is a caption of a video I’m doing. This is another video I’m doing. This one’s only seven minutes. This one’s 33 minutes. This one, I do a transcript of podcasts I’m not even the host of, but I’m on and so I just embed the player on my website, and then I do a caption of what I was saying on there, so it makes it searchable. It also helps that person who’s doing the podcast because it makes that podcast more visible because it’s on multiple websites. This was another video I was on that was not my own video, but I embedded that video on my podcast and did a transcript of that. In this case, I didn’t do captions of that video, but I did a transcript of when I was interviewed on that video. Here’s another podcast I did a transcript of and so on. This shows here that this video is in progress that we just uploaded, and I really expect it’ll be done quite quickly, but what can we do with it right now? We can only rename it. For videos or podcasts that have been completed, I can open it, share it, rename, download, delete.
Now, I want to point out first about downloading. What I like to do is download as a transcript file, a .txt file, and it’s just the most simple file that can be used in many different situations. I view that and do simple editing there. If I need to edit anything for my blog post which I do a blog post about every single video or podcast. But this video happened to have a lot of technical information in it, so what I am doing is I’m going to open it. What does it mean to open a video? Well, it shows it in the editor.
Now this was a very technical video, and it had some interesting spellings. It had some different ways that we shot it. Some part of it was a screen cast. Part of it was a walk and talk interview, so some of the first things I check is to make sure that the peoples’ name is spelled correctly, particularly if they have a hard name, and it looks like it was spelled correctly.
Now I noticed that they spelled the word VidCon wrong. That’s just what I said it, I said it too fast. They spelled it with a T, so I want to replace it with a D. Now I am very impressed with how this particular editor did my job, and I’m going to give them a very good ranking. But for some reason they used when they did hundreds of thousands, they used the space here. That may be a European or other type of language. Well, what I am going to do is I’m just going to do a search. I’m just going to do a search for three zeros with a space in front of them, and I am just going to replace all. There’s 17 instances of that. I’m just going to replace that all with zeros with no space. Now, it’s very likely that it’s correct throughout.
There’s another word I just want to make sure is TubeBuddy is spelled correctly, yeah. It looks correct, and this was a very complicated term, the Practical Diversified Recommendations on YouTube with Determinantal Point Process, and they got it! They did it very well. Of course it was spelled onscreen, so they should have gotten it, right? So, well done.
Now I could listen to this whole video and make sure I got it, but you know what? I really don’t need to do that. However there is some weird words, very technical words. What is the latent cross? Since my blog is going to be one of the few blogs on the internet that has a video embedded in text about the word latent cross, that’s something I want to make sure is very visible. Now, they did spell it correctly, so that should be good enough, but I’m even going to put it in quotes. In fact, let’s put determinantal in quotes. Very well done.
So now I’m going to upload this to YouTube. Now this will overwrite the captions that the caption writer already uploaded to my YouTube channel, but that’s okay because I know these are the correct ones, or they’re at least more correct. And I can go to the video to check it out.
Okay, great to hear. They sent me an email that said they’re going to be doing the captions, how much it costs, I can click on this.
If I go to the video that I’ve been captioning, I can see that when I have the captions on, this area here is demonstrating that it has commas, it has capital letters, it has periods, it has punctuation, so what that means is that this is actually been manually captioned. When you have an automated caption, generally it doesn’t have commas or anything else like that. It doesn’t have question marks. I know that this has been properly captioned, and if we go to edit video, and we go to transcriptions, now I don’t know why they now call it transcriptions in the YouTube Studio, but they do. It’s transcriptions not audio, but anyway this is the transcriptions that we have done. There are other features here.
You can do spell check which I am already satisfied with my spell check. You can do different keys that speed things up, different keyboard shortcuts, and there’s other things you can do like go back all the way to the beginning. If you don’t like any of your changes or you made a mistake, so just delete all of your changes.
Then there’s atmospherics. For instance if you have a lot of sound effects like cars screeching or drum playing, that might be helpful for the hearing impaired, but most of what I do happens to be dealing with what’s being said not sound effects generally.
There’s some words like “gonna” for me is I think a terrible word, so I prefer it to be “going to.” I’m not that interested in things being very informal because I’m also going to use this text as a blog post, so I don’t want to have to go through and correct the word going to throughout a video even though truthfully in the English language today we use a lot of casual, informal words.
There’s different spellings for UK and the US. You might want to toggle from one to another or remove gaps between the captions. Now, I can also download a transcript here. I like to do the TXT because for me that’s just the most simple file. It doesn’t have any formatting, and I can just go through and do some very quick copy and paste. That type of thing, and then a quick transcript ready to go for my blog post, or I can reedit it quickly into a series of bullet points or whatever I want. But the SRT file is most common for YouTube. There’s a lot of different files depending on what format you’re using, but for me I stick to the SRT and the TXT.
There’s other options like changing the start time, but I don’t use that.
I rated this video a five because this person did a fantastic job with some complicated language, and I really appreciated it. I usually don’t do rankings as you can see, but occasionally I will rank something low, a two or a three usually. Very rarely, but in this instance on this podcast, we did a transcript and while the person got all of the words right, they got the speakers wrong, and so it wasn’t even wrong in an even way. It was an uneven way, so sometimes the speakers were right, and sometimes the speakers were wrong, so I had to go in and manually change the speaker names on every single paragraph which was a time sink. Sadly, I don’t want that editor again. Thus, I’ve asked for them not to be my editor again, and I do that by ranking them a number two out of five which is sad because it was almost perfect, but a small mistake made it entirely unusable for me, so that was very sad.
Back here in your dashboard you can also search for specific files, names, etc. Look at your order history, how much it costs, what was the name. Here’s one that says currently in progress. When did you do them? As you can see I’ve done a lot.
There’s settings, too. For instance, do you want email alerts? Which email accounts are linked? So, I like to have US English. I like to not have a Speaker ID. Again, this is with the captions, not with the transcriptions. I prefer a SubRip. That’s the SRT. I prefer no atmospherics. That means no car noises or drums or nothing that says soft music happens. These are all straightforward, but I like the no atmospherics. I also do not like informal spelling. That’s very important for me because I’m going to use this text as a blog post, and if I have to correct all the “gonnas” to going to’s, that’s going to take me a lot of time.
Now, I want to send you to this next video that’ll show you how to turn your video into a blog post so you get double the views on Google because you can rank for the blog post, and you can rank for the video, both on Google. So, I’m going to ask you to click there. You do that, and you’ll be Golden.