What are captions?

Captions display a program's audio content as text on-screen. They help viewers understand auditory information when the sound is muted, unavailable, inaudible, or if the viewer is deaf or hard of hearing.

Although similar, captions and subtitles are different. Captioning transcribes dialogue and important audio content to text. Subtitling, however, transcribes and translates dialogue spoken in a foreign language.

Captions come in two forms, closed captions and open captions. Closed captions can be turned on or off by the viewer on their media device. Open captions always display on screens since they're burning directly onto the video track.

Rev now offers burned-in captions (delivered as an MP4 video file) for an additional $0.30 per video minute. You may add this feature at checkout or add burned-in captions to a previous order. 

Once your order has been completed, to review, customize, or reprocess your burned-in captions video, select your file from your My Files page. That should open it up in our Customer Editor.

If you then click on the download button, in the top right of the Customer Editor, you'll see a popup that has the SRT and Video file formats listed.

Remove the SRT file format so that only "Video" remains, then select the option to customize, and click next.

That will then take you to the burned-in captions customization options, as shown in the following video:

Once you're done making your changes, click on Generate Video to reprocess the burn-in.

The burned-in video will not be downloaded instantaneously like the other caption output formats; instead, you will be notified via email once your burned-in video is ready, which takes roughly one-fifth of the length of the video (i.e. a 10-minute video may take about 2 minutes to burn the captions in).

Caption files are delivered in many formats such as SRT for online videos or SCC for broadcast television.

Click here to learn more about captions at Rev.