Add English captions to a product demo video for YouTube

Steps

1. Upload the finished, published-cut video rather than the raw takes, and set the spoken language to English so terms like stainless and dishwasher-safe are recognised against the correct vocabulary.
2. Play the timed lines back at slightly faster speed and correct names, quantities and the phrase about the warranty by hand. Automatic captions almost never get brand vocabulary right without this pass.
3. Export the subtitle file, attach it to the video on YouTube, then watch the opening and closing thirty seconds in the subtitle editor to catch any line that splits one sentence across two cues.

Worked example

Input file

garlic-press-demo-final.mp4 — 6 minutes 12 seconds, one presenter at a kitchen bench, quiet room, three short music stings between sections, 1080p master file.

Settings

Spoken language English (US), line length capped at 42 characters, at most two lines per cue, speaker labels off, export as SRT in UTF-8.

Expected result

A garlic-press-demo-final.srt whose lines follow the narration, with stainless steel and the two-year warranty spelled correctly and no cue asking viewers to read for more than about three seconds.

Illustrative example: the demo, its timings and its corrections are a teaching sample, not footage or measured results from a real channel.

Common mistakes

• Captioning the rough cut and editing the video afterwards. Every removed pause shifts the timing, so captions written against an early cut drift visibly out of sync within the first minute.
• Leaving a music label on every sting. Three short stings can turn into a string of noise cues, so keep one music note per section and delete the duplicates.

Frequently asked question

Should captions be burned into the picture or uploaded as a file?

Upload the file on YouTube: viewers can switch it off and the platform can translate it. Burn captions into the picture only for a copy headed to a service with no caption track, and keep the SRT as your master either way.