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All you need to know to create, edit and translate captions for your videos - including examples and recommendations
Updated on Sep, 2026
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Captions and subtitles
You may know the closed caption icon from YouTube or Netflix. Captions are an important tool in video production to make videos and even entire movies or TV shows accessible to a larger - possibly even international - audience. Deaf and hearing-impaired people can easily follow and understand your videos through subtitles. You help foreign language learners learn a new language. Maybe you have even used subtitles in your favourite TV show yourself to improve your foreign language skills - especially if English is not your first language.
In this course, I will teach you a lot about subtitles and captions. You will not only learn how to create and edit subtitles with free offline and online editors, but also some theoretical background on formats, guidelines to create great captions, transcriptions and even translations. This video course contains nine sections:
Introduction In this section, I present the course contents and give you a quick introduction to captions.
Theory This section gives you some nice-to-have background knowledge on the difference between subtitles, closed captions and open captions, as well as an overview of the most important subtitle formats. If you are already at an intermediate or expert level, you may skip these sections. Beginners, however, should definitely take a look at those videos.
Guidelines This is one of the most important sections. Many courses and videos teach how to create captions. However, a lot of them fail to explain how to design great captions that are easy to follow and that do not distract from the video content. Captions should support the viewer in their understanding of your video content. While well-designed captions add value to a video, bad captions may even disturb the viewer. I explain some of the most important guidelines to you and even show you a short example of good and bad captions. Please do not skip this section, even if you want to start creating captions right away!
Preparation This section deals with transcriptions. Do you think you can create captions directly without a script? Maybe that will work. But maybe it won't. A transcription of the video can help you later on. Keep in mind that this is not an in-depth course about transcriptions. I just want to introduce you to the topic of transcriptions and show you some tricks, software and hardware to use.
The Offline Way This section is the one you were all waiting for. In this section, I teach you how to use offline tools like Subtitle Edit or Aegisub to create captions for your videos. To benefit the most, I advise you to also download these tools and try them out yourself. Create some captions for your own videos to train your captioning skills!
The Subtitle Track After you have created your own captions in the last section, this section shows you how to use subtitles offline. I will explain how to embed subtitles into MP4 and MKV video files as a track and how to use captions with the VLC media player. This section is relevant for you if you want to work with videos and captions offline. If you want to create subtitles for your online videos, take a look at the next section instead.
The Online Way This section presents different websites and online editors to create, edit and upload closed captions to your videos. I will explain why different formats are important and show you ways to use captions for your YouTube videos. You need this section for any online videos, because websites cannot read the subtitle tracks you may have created in the sixth section.
Translation Through captions, you can appeal to an international audience and grow your community over time. This section presents processes and tools for an easy and cheap translation of your videos.
The End In this last video, I recap what you have learned in the course. Congratulations on coming this far!
Check out the detailed breakdown of what’s inside the course
Hi, my name is Felix! I am an IT-consultant and learning video producer. On Tutorialspoint, I primarily teach technology and business related topics.
I studied Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University and specialized on Software Engineering (model-based and generative). Besides programming, I count recording and cutting learning videos to my passions.
After my studies, I worked as a Consultant for IT and Digitalization for Draw my Business GmbH. In March 2020 I started my current job as a SAP Consultant at Reply GmbH. Also, starting in 2020, I decided to produce my own educational videos under the name TUNAtorials.
I am looking forward to each and every participant in my courses. Feel free to contact me at any time if you have feedback, questions or even some ideas for new video courses.
I hope you enjoy my videos and learn something new! Thank you.
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