How to Edit YouTube Auto-Captions

OK, folks, I'm going to show you how to caption that video you just uploaded. I'm at YouTube.com and I am logged into my YouTube account and I can tell because I see my picture in that upper right corner. And I'm going to click there, on my picture, and then go down to Creator Studio. You should see the video that you just uploaded under Videos. If you don't, over on the left side you can click on Video Manager. And once you click there it will show you all the videos you've uploaded. So click on the video that you want to caption. Now at the top of the video you're going to see several tabs. The last tab says Subtitles/CC. That's where we want to go so I'm going to click there. Set video language. Set the video language to English, assuming that is the language you spoke. And click "Set language." You can set that as the default for future videos if you'd like.

OK, so here is my video

Now what you want to look for is, over here on the right, when Youtube finishes its auto-captions you're going to see an option underneath this button that says "Add new subtitles or CC." And that option will say something like, "English-Automatic." That's not there yet. That means that the captions, the auto-captions on YouTube are still processing. So, since I don't have a transcript that I started with, I want to actually wait for those auto-captions to finish and then I'm going to go back and edit them. So I'm going to just come back in a minute or so and refresh the page. OK, I just refreshed my page again and you'll see that now underneath that blue bar that says, "Add new subtitles or CC" we have this new option here that says, "Published" "English-Automatic." Now, I'll let you know that that took about 5 minutes so keep that in mind when you're working on your own captions. What we want to do now is edit the automatic captions that YouTube has provided because they're not perfect. And they do not include spelling and grammar. So I'm going to click on English Automatic. And then

in the upper right corner, click on the Edit button

And now you can go into each of these lines of text over on the left and edit the spelling and grammar and punctuation. You simply click and type over it. When you're done editing your captions click on Save Changes in the upper right corner. This takes you back to the Manage subtitles and closed captions page. And what you'll see now is that you have two caption tracks. One is the English Automatic, so those are the automatic captions, and then down here it says Pending Publish. This is the one that we just did. But it hasn't published yet. No one will see your edited captions unless they are published.

So go ahead and click on that track

And now you'll see that they are both published. So the final step is to unpublish the automatic captions. So click on the Automatic track. In the upper right corner, click Unpublish. Click Delete draft. And Delete. And now the only published track is the edited version of those automatic captions that you just created. So you can play your video and click on the CC icon to see those play. And your video is now captioned accurately.

Tags: automatic video captioning