In the video you see me copy the colour codes of my brand colours from a page on the adobe website. If you're curious what I'm using check it out here.
It's quick to record a video – on your phone, using zoom, loom, webcamera.io or whatever but in order to post it on social media you often want to “polish” it a bit and add captions for those who don't have the sound on to hear you talk (they say it's over 80% of people!).
There are countless options, so I'm not saying Kapwing.com is the only or even best one.
But it has a simple, powerful and free set of tools that allows you to do both – editing and adding captions – without changing platforms.
1. Video Editing
In the first part of the tutorial I walk you through how to
- change the format to a social media friendly one
- trim to cut out unwanted parts
- add space at the bottom for captions that are easy to read
- add a title at the top
- add an outro with logo and animated text
It's of course not as powerful as professional video editing software but it's simple and quick, and it gives you what you need to get your video ready for social media.
2. Adding Captions
In the second part of the tutorial I'm adding captions ..
- there are 3 options: generate captions manually, auto-generate, or upload a .srt file generated elsewhere
- I show you how to auto-generate captions and then edit them
I found Kapwing by far the best tool to get captions onto a video because of the formatting control it gives you.
For caption creation I'm still in two minds and, pushed for a choice, I'd stay with aegisub.org (I created an entire tutorial on different options for caption creation here)
Let me know if the tutorial is helpful. If you try it I'd love to hear your experience. If you know a better tool I'd love to hear about that too. Get in touch!
Update (October 1019)
After using kapwing.com for a few videos now I noticed I settled into a simpler workflow – doing everything from Kapwing studio:
- Trimming, adjusting format, adding padding and title text
- Add a blank scene, add logo and website url (outro)
- Go to subtitle tab and manually add captions (automatic captions are NOT available from here. If you want to use those you have to publish and download the video and then upload it into the Subtitler tool)
- Publish
Extra benefit from using kapwing: The file size of the exported video is super small (approx. 30MB for a 2 minute video)
