What Makes the Best App for Adding Captions to Videos?

If you’re not captioning your videos, you’re missing out on reaching a huge potential audience that will continue scrolling past your content. Using an app to caption videos allows content creators, business owners, and other storytellers the ability to engage viewers immediately and more completely. Put simply, adding captions as part of the video editing process is essential to reach the maximum number of people across various social media and video platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

As content creators continue to recognize the critical importance of video captions, they’ve turned their sights on choosing the best tools to streamline and simplify the editing process. Read on, and learn why content creators are using captions and what makes the best app for adding captions to videos.

Why Add Captions to Video?

Content creators, business owners, and other storytellers are using video captions to elevate their media to the next level. There are tons of benefits of using an app to caption videos including:

• Extending average video watch time after publishing
• Engaging viewers watching video without sound
• Increasing accessibility by using captions for hearing impairment
• Making it easier for non-native English speakers to watch
• Improving video content SEO, making your content more discoverable

As social media platforms continue to roll out auto-captioning features, why add captions to video yourself? Social platforms like Instagram and TikTok rely on auto-generated captions, which are not always 100% correct. Choosing the best app for adding captions to videos gives you the full ability to edit and control the captions for your media and ensure 100% accuracy.

Beyond accuracy, using an app to caption videos also prevents issues many creators come up against with native platform editing tools. Social media platforms experience technical issues from time to time, leading to problems with captions being generated when uploading video. Instagram caption tools, for example, have been known to disappear from the creator’s toolkit and reappear days later, leaving them without video captioning capabilities when publishing a story or reel.

Using an app to caption videos lets you burn captions into your media, ensuring that everyone viewing your video can also see them, regardless of whether or not the social platform is having trouble.

Features of the Best App for Adding Captions to Videos

Choosing the best app for adding captions to videos means finding one with all the options you could ever need. Using an app to caption videos should simplify and streamline the editing process, saving you time and money while increasing productivity and quality. Captioning apps cut out turnaround time from hiring third-party services and puts you in complete control of your media.

Some of the features to look for that make the best app for adding captions to videos are:

• Automatically add captions to video with the push of a button
• Import audio file (i.e. podcast) to create a shareable video
• Easily edit video captions after they’re transcribed
• Availability as an app on iOS and Android devices as well as on Macbook 
• Import and export SRT files
• Creative control over captions, including importing your own font and where they go
• Automatically translate your captions into other languages
• Video import and export capabilities

1. Add Captions to Videos Automatically

One of the biggest features to look for when determining the best app for adding captions to videos is auto-captioning. Top-quality captioning apps automatically add captions at the touch of a button while maintaining the accuracy and elegance missing from native social media platform editing toolkits.

2. Import Audio Files to Create Shareable Videos

Not all content starts out as video! What happens when you want to share audio files (from a podcast or voice memo, for example) as videos across social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram? The best app for adding captions to video will allow you to upload these audio files and create shareable videos quickly and efficiently. Share all kinds of media to your accounts and tell your story.

3. Easily Edit Video Captions After Transcription

What good is using an app to caption videos if it’s not easy to edit your captions after they’re transcribed? The best app for adding captions to videos puts content creators, business owners, and storytellers in the driver’s seat to easily edit captions to ensure 100% accuracy. Editing captions allows you to make sure your message is displayed the way you meant it to be.

4. Availability of Video Captioning Apps

Using a video captioning app provides powerful editing tools at your fingertips, but you shouldn’t be limited to a mobile app. The best app for adding captions to videos will offer other options, as well. For example, the video captioning app MixCaptions is available on the iOS / Mac App Store as well as Google Play.

5. Import and Export SRT Files

Videos for platforms like Instagram and TikTok rely on adding open captions, or captions burned into your video and visible to viewers at all times. The best app for adding captions to videos, however, will also give you the ability to import and export SRT files used in closed captioning. Importing SRT files makes adding captions to videos even faster while creating an SRT file and exporting it lets you upload it to a platform that gives creators control over closed captioning (like YouTube and Vimeo).

YouTube is the largest platform that allows video content creators to upload their own SRT files to maintain control over closed captioning. This means that there’s really no one-size-fits-all approach to adding captions to videos. Choose an app that allows you to export video with open captioning as well as create SRT files for uploading where applicable.  

6. Creative Control Over Caption Styling

Using a video captioning app like MixCaptions gives you complete control over telling your story with the ability to add, edit, and style open captions for videos exactly how you want. Import your personal font to maintain your preferred aesthetic, add effects to captions, change colors, add shadow, use text backgrounds and more to get the final look you want. You can also choose where you want your captions to display on the video.

7. Automatically Translate Captions in Other Languages

Adding captions to video is all about increasing the reach of your media and engaging a wider audience. The best app to caption videos will give you the ability to automatically translate captions into other languages as well as export the SRT file for all translated languages at the same time. The ability to translate captions into other languages like Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish gives your media global reach possibilities. 

8. Video Import and Export Options

You’re using the best app for adding captions to videos because you want your media to be the highest quality. That means your editing tools need to support high-quality video import and export capabilities. The ability to import and export videos with captions in 4K is a must to produce content that will stand out from the crowd. Beyond playback quality, choose an app to caption video that lets you export media in common video ratios ideal for YouTube and TikTok as well as Instagram Stories and Reels.

Choosing the best app for adding captions to videos will have a huge impact on your media. Content creators, business owners, and storytellers need to be doing all they can to maximize content reach and accessibility. With a captioning app, adding captions to videos during the editing process has never been easier. Take your content to the next level!