Videos uploaded to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram all have one thing in common: they automatically start playing while users scroll their feed and are muted by default.
This behavior on all major social media platforms made it necessary to add subtitles to all the videos. Otherwise, users just scroll over it. As a social media content creator, you need to create these videos quickly and often.
Say hello to Subly. A web-app that helps you to add subtitles to your video quickly.
Here’s how it works.
You upload your video (account needed) and tell the tool what the language of your video is.
The service then tries to create the subtitles automagically.
I’ve tried that with both English and German, the results where okay-ish. To the defense of the service: my English has an accent and the German video has a lot of English words in it.
But you can edit the subtitles. After you are done editing them, you can also change the style of the subtitles.
In most cases, the default placement for your subtitles is centered at the bottom, but you can change that if you want. Also, you can try different colors and outlines for the subtitles (don’t make subtitles that distract from the actual video content).
Play the video and check the results. If you are happy with your changes, you can click “Add Subtitles to Video”.
Subly then generates a video with the subtitles hardcoded into it plus a .SRT file to download.
Now you can upload your subtitled video to your social media account.
Here is an example video I created without editing the subtitles.
A great, simple, single-purpose service to quickly add subtitles to your social media videos.
The service launched in February and is currently free to use.
Got curious? Record a video with your webcam and try it out yourself!
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