Video Subtitle Burning – Who Needs It?

What are Video Subtitle Burning Services? 

When it comes to subtitling services, there are two main options available for videos, whether online or broadcast. The first is to use timed, coded text as a sidecar file which includes captions. In this case, viewers may choose to turn subtitles on and off, or toggle between languages. The second option is for you to burn your subtitles into your videos. Video Subtitle burning effectively means adding subtitles to your videos permanently as part of the video image. This ensures that captions cannot be turned on and off by viewers, but conveniently display as default.

When is subtitle burning used? 

Not every viewer enjoys watching videos with captions. For this reason, there are very specific times when it’s a good idea to use subtitle burning services for your onscreen text. Here are some examples below…

Social Media Subtitles 

Viewers engaging with social media often do it using n their i Phones, androids, smartphones or other handheld devices. For this reason, online social media videos are often watched remotely: on a train, in a café, at the park or whilst hanging out with friends. For this reason, many viewers actually enjoy social media videos with the sound turned off. More and more, videos on Facebook, Twitter and  even YouTube and Vimeo use subtitles for the best access and engagement.

Multilingual Films 

The most frequent place to see burned or embedded subtitles is in bilingual or multilingual films where video subtitle burning is added for secondary and tertiary languages. For example, if a film is predominantly English but a few characters speak in other languages. Here, subtitle translation can be combined with burning to ensure that viewers have access to the foreign speech. In terms of subtitling services for multilingual films, this is also a useful technique for fictitious languages. Just think of Klingon subtitles in Star Trek or Elvish and Orcish in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

eLearning Modules and Series 

Over the years, video subtitles have been proven to improve focus, engagement and understanding. In terms of academic videos, eLearning subtitles are definitely beneficial. Burning in course subtitles means viewers won’t need to interrupt the flow of each module by toggling subtitles on and off. Closed captioning is also considered a legal requirement for accessibility in educational material to ensure equality. Video subtitle burning effectively covers two bases. It’s simple to upload burned videos as there’s no need to work with sidecar caption files. Instead, each video is fully packaged and ready to go!

Graphical Films and Videos 

Video subtitle burning is the perfect option for adding captions to videos with a lot of onscreen graphics or textual information. Whilst many broadcast and VoD closed caption formats allow subtitlers to edit text placement, SRT files don’t.

For this reason, if you are distributing videos that have a lot of onscreen graphics and/or text that you don’t want obscured by captions, subtitle burning is your best bet. Burning subtitles can mean more freedom to work with placement, colours, transparency filters and even artistic effects in your subtitles. For this reason, it’s great for graphical films and videos.

Don’t forget to also include SRT 

Even if you have chosen to work with subtitling services which include burning, there are huge benefits to working with subtitle sidecar files. Obviously, you will need to hide or disable the SRT file from displaying over the top of your already captioned video. However, uploading SRT files alongside your videos allows Google and other search engines to index and crawl your keywords which is great for SEO.

Adding video subtitle burning is a really useful technique if you want to send someone a subtitled video but you’re not sure what setup will be used to view it through. Hard coding ensures that everyone will see the same no matter what setup is used. 

Here at Capital Captions we work hard to ensure our services are world class and are committed to value for money. Would you like to talk to one of our friendly members of staff about video burning services or would like to add closed captions to your videos? If so, contact us today by phone on +44 (0) 1634 867 131 or send us a message through our quote page to see what we can offer you today.