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.

The end product for captions is what is known as a sidecar file. It's a versatile, text-based file that you can then add to your video by uploading the caption file to the online platform where your video is hosted or burn into the video itself. This is the industry standard for closed captions. When you order captions with Rev, all of our caption formats are included for free. 

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.

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.