Creating Subtitle Files (.VTT) for my Udemy Courses Using YouTube

Hello everyone today I'm here to show you how to create web .VTT files to upload with Udemy courses. Now I need subtitles with my videos because my student population for a lot of them English is their second language, and since the course material is presented in English it helps for them to have subtitles they can follow along with, and it's something that is often requested.

So, if you want to know more about web

VTT ss a format it's based off of the SRT format and Udemy use to use SRT but they recently switched to VTT. So, let's get started.

The easiest way I have found is to actually use a YouTube channel to first upload the video to because then what YouTube does is the system automatically generates subtitles and it times them, and that is often the most time-consuming part of creating a subtitle file is formatting it with the proper timings for the text to line up with the audio

So, the first thing you're going to do is to hit upload, I'm in my youtube channel right now, and then I'm going to select files to upload and I'm going to click the red arrow and then let's let's go and upload this video. The first thing I want to do I want to make this a private video, I don't want to upload this to the public because this is going to be published on Udemy. I'm going to go ahead and hit done and then let me go back to the video manager. So, once the videos done processing it generally takes YouTube anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to automatically generate the subtitles, so if you go up to the subtitles...oops it's not ready yet, anyway let me show you with a video I already uploaded before I started this tutorial and I can show you how the process goes. So, I'm going to go ahead and go to the top of the screen and hit subtitles & CC, and then you'll see English Automatic. So, I'm going to hit that. Alright so as you can see the system automatically generates both the timings and the words it thinks is in the video. Now this is gonna be a bit off especially if you have a course that is heavily technical, a lot of technical terms, the system will often get it wrong because it tends to default to common phrases, common words when it can't understand what exactly it is you're saying. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and hit edit. Ok see then if I hit play it will automatically scroll down as the audio progresses through the text. So, I chose a shorter video just to show you the process it wont be a 30 minute to hour long video but it does take a bit, but the the better you get at it the more efficient you will get at it. So, first thing i'm going to do is capitalize the "S," so you see when I said boot up the system read it as me saying food, so that's the first correction.

Alright instead of around

"First thing I'm going to do is quickly hit "delete" I like to parenthesis around technical terms or things I'm specifically pressing on the keyboard.

I already know this is hardware

You can see this is a process and I'm just going to scroll down and capitalize and punctuate correctly and correct the more technical terms that YouTube is misreading.

So let me go ahead and pause this recording and I will start it back up once I get to the end of the text

Alright, so I just finished the edits, it took me about I don't know maybe five minutes to finish this off and this is only a minute and a half long video, so you can see that at least for me getting started i've haven't done this very much about five minutes maybe a little less than five minutes for every one minute of video, but I also like to be more specific. If you're presenting something that isn't as technical it will go much more smoothly because YouTube will be able to read what you're saying better. So, anyway let me go ahead and hit publish edits, and then what I'm going to do is go to this second published subtitle which is English, the automatic is what YouTube generated, and you'll see all your edits.

So now what I can do is I can hit the actions button and I'm gonna click

VTT because .VTT is what Udemy reads. So, I'm gonna go ahead and go to my Udemy course and we are going to go to lecture 5, hit the add captions button, select English US, upload subtitle file, downloads, captions file, hit add caption, and let's go ahead and preview it as a student, and then this is where the closed captions are. Awesome! It looks as if everything is good and let me open that up more time I just want to be sure that the captions go to the very end, and the timing is awesome. So, like I said I need .VTT files you also have an option to .SRT, this is what it is what an SRT file looks like, this is what a VTT file looks like, and I believe you can even generate a .SBV, sorry don't have an app for that. Anyway, .VTT is what I need and after I'm done I'll just go ahead and delete this video. So, the one other thing you can do now for that previous video I didn't write a script I was just talking as I was performing the actions within the computer BIOS, but if you have a script you can also upload a script. So, let's go to this video and then I'm going to do add new subtitles or CC, and I'm going to hit English, upload a file, upload transcript, and let me go to where my transcript is for this particular video. Let's go ahead and hit. upload Let's take a look. Alright so now let's hit set timings, ok so subtitle timings are being set check back soon, so I'm going to pause this video one more time, and I'll come back once the subtitle timings are set so we can see how good a job YouTube does with the video transcript. Alright, so that shouldn't take too long it only took like 30 seconds. So, this is what YouTube generated and it looks as if the first two lines these are just system files so I'm X these out. Let's see how well it's timed. So, that's pretty good. I guess I forgot to capitalize the T in the original file. So, if you actually prepare your own script it makes it a lot easier, you don't have to go into each individual line and edit the punctuation, and capitalize, all that good stuff. So, if you already are writing a script then YouTube is great because you can just upload this, and then I could publish this, and then go back into it and then I can download the VTT file like that, and then upload it to the course. So, that's how you create subtitle files using YouTube and this is absolutely free. I haven't used any of the fancy programs for subtitling but I can't imagine them being any more accurate than YouTube because YouTube already generates captions on its own for every single video that's uploaded, so I can't imagine that some other program being more accurate or doing better than YouTube.

I hope this tutorial was helpful for you and thank you for watching

Tags: srt file download