This article is talking about open caption vs closed caption. Despite both being equally important when added to videos, you’ll get to know when it’s preferable to use closed caption and open caption in your videos.
In a simple word, the difference between an open caption and a closed caption is, open caption is permanently burned into the video and so cannot be turned off, while closed caption can be turned off. In a video, a closed caption is represented by CC, and an open caption by OC.
But would you love to increase your video engagement rate and view time? Continue reading to know the current captioning statistics, and you will know how to add open captions and closed captions.
What is Closed Caption?
Suppose your target audience is in a noisy or very quiet place and wants to your video without disrupting others. How would also make people with hearing disability access your video?
Closed captions are written texts depicting what is being said in a video, podcast, movie, or live stream. With closed captions, the audience has the option to toggle on and off captions.
Due to the growing need to diversify viewership even across different cultures and ethnic languages, some closed captions are transcribed in a different language. When captioning your videos in a translated language, it’s important to consider the qualification of the translator.
To avoid such an incident, we recommend partnering with a top video subtitling services with subtitling experts. This will ensure the message conveyed in the video is passed to the viewer accurately.
How Does Closed Caption Work?
When adding closed captions to a video, you have to assume the captions are intended for viewers who cannot hear. And so your target audience should be able to read the texts in realtime with corresponding video frames.
Closed captions are therefore meant to relay spoken words and illustrations in a video in a text form.
How to Do Closed Captioning?
Anyone can do closed captioning, but for complex videos, movies, and live streams, a captioning or subtitling expert would deliver the best results.
Here’s how to do closed captioning.
Step 1: To do closed captioning, you’ll need to transcribe the video audio. Adding all elements including laughter captions and illustrations will bring out the emotion and humor as depicted in the video. To include every expression and speech in closed captioning, you’ll need to watch your video multiple times. For multiple videos, you may require to order subtitling services from a renowned company to lessen the work and make sure your captions are accurate.
Step 2: Next, you’ll have to save the transcribed audio in a file compatible with your video file format.
Step 3: Lastly, upload the video file and the transcription to your preferred platform.
What Does Open Caption Mean?
When captioning for an audience and accessibility is your main concern, the best caption to use is an open caption. This type of captioning ensures an inclusive viewing experience whether deaf or not. For a video whose audio is in English and the target audience is Koreans, or Japanese, the best captioning practice is to use an open caption.
Open caption means the video’s transcribed texts are permanently embedded in the video and remain open throughout the video for the viewer to read. The viewer has no option to toggle captions off in open caption.
How to Add Open Captions Manually to a Video?
To add open captions manually to your videos, first, record a high-quality video.
Next, transcribe your video audio to text. There are several ways to transcribe your video. You can use:
- DIY Manual Transcription.
In DIY manual transcription, you’ll have to watch and type the video audio to text yourself. It’s a costless process but time-consuming.
- Automatic Captioning Software.
To automatically generate captions for your videos, we recommend subscribing to captioning software. Some captioning software help in uploading the generated subtitles directly to the video. The main challenge when using these software tools is the monthly or annual cost. Other disadvantages of using captioning software tools are; they require downloading, others have o auto subtitling feature, and some have complex interfaces.
Here are the top video caption software you should consider.
- Rev – Best video caption software for both audio and video files.
- Subtitle Edit – Best open-source video caption software.
- Captioning Star – Top video and audio captioning software for both open and closed caption.
- Riverside – Best video and audio transcription tool powered by AI
- Human Transcription, or Subtitling Services.
If you do publish videos too often, or your videos are lengthy, hiring a transcription or subtitling company is the best option. Among the advantages of using human transcription include guaranteed transcription high accuracy, and human transcriptionists can understand slang, illustrations, and humans cannot be destructed by video background noise.
The cons of using human subtitling services are long videos take many hours to transcribe, although rare humans can make mistakes, and human transcription is costlier than captioning software.
Need a Captioning/Subtitling Service?
Captioning is critical in video production and localization. If your aim is to expose your content to a larger audience base and achieve the video’s intended goals, we recommend you work with professional subtitling services for a high-quality result.
At Wordspath, we provide you with one-stop video post-editing needs, including subtitling, transcription, voice over, script translation services.
Through our 8-step subtitling process we ensure our client’s video captions are of the highest quality. Whichever language you would like your captions to be, we have a translation template that takes cognizance of the source language and generates subtitles focused on the client’s target audience.
To match your video file format with the right subtitles format, we have the capacity to generate subtitles in 14 different subtitle formats.
Our subtitling services cover a wide range of topics. Whether you’re in video games and gaming, software, medical and health, automotive, or business and finance, we’ve got an expert human transcriptionist who understands the terminologies in your topic.
Go further to know every detail of the professional subtitling services.
It’s not once or twice that the least expected video has gotten global attention and gone viral for months! Would you imagine your video going viral, yet the majority of the population cannot understand your content? This means you’ve to always cast your net wider by translating and transcribing your videos.
Besides captioning/subtitling, Wordspath has experts ready to help translate and localize your videos and live streams.
Why Are Captions So Important in Videos?
No matter which type of caption you choose, captions are important when added to a video. It’s a fact that adding video captions to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Vimeo videos increases views and user engagement. According to Verizon Media, over 83% of US consumers who watch videos on phones turn the sounds off.
- Adding captions to videos helps improve content visibility
To engage viewers who neither understand your audio language, adding captions transcribed in different languages will improve content visibility. Again, with the US alone having over 20 million people with visual impairment, adding captions in your videos will enable this population to access your videos.
- Closed captions increase content interaction
Would you imagine the impact your video will have without captions, and yet 69% of viewers watch videos with sound turned off in public places? As video viewers move from one environment to another, the ability to interact with video audio changes. To make your target audience interact with your video in every environment, add captions.
- Captions in videos help increase view time
In situations where it’s difficult to comprehend video audio, the video view time is short. Since most video viewers know how to read, we recommend uploading your videos with either closed caption or open caption. The video engagement rate starts to decrease after the 2nd-minute spot.
Adding captions will help improve your video engagement rate and subsequently increase the video’s view time.
- Captions give videos global viewership
Every country’s population today has foreign residents and thousands of others on tourist visas. And it’s a common practice to create videos with a specific target audience for better monitoring and more conversions, it’s now time to give every video a global perception.
Uploading your video captions in different languages with make the videos a global viewership.
Open Caption vs Closed Caption: the Differences
Comparing open caption vs open caption, you may be more interested in adding closed captions to your videos. Partly because closed captions are simple and easy to interact with. Your audience can toggle the CC (Close caption) initials off at any point.
Permanently embedding video captions – open caption is what differentiates it from closed caption. In open caption, the audience has no option to turn captions off.
