I use Adobe Premiere Pro to make captions for my YouTube videos easily.
My current workflow uses Camtasia to do the screen captures. I’m still learning so I’ll probably get more efficient as I go.
Once I’ve got a draft of the video ready, I export it from Camtasia into an MP4. I take that video and load it into Adobe Premiere Pro and use its closed captioning features to get a transcript of the audio. I can revise the script inside of Premiere.
Premiere will play back the video with a text cursor tracking the video. This makes it possible to stay synchronized when I re-record the audio with Audacity. (Even if I’ve made changes to the script.) My initial audio recording has a lot of keypress noises that I want to get rid of.
There is an advantage to importing the audio from Audacity’s .MP3: if I need to correct the audio later, I just need to change the MP3 itself. Camtasia imports the audio anew each time it starts. If I respect timing, the final audio will get my adjustments automagically. This is even true if I’ve split up the audio and rearranged it. One example of a later stage adjustment is to remove breath sounds. I still am learning audio recording techniques.
Once I have the video completely finished and ready to upload to YouTube, I load the MP4 into Premiere again and create a final transcription of the video. I edit it to correct voice recognition errors and to improve punctuation. This preserves the synchronization between the text and the video. I then export the captions into an .SRT file. This is much less work than trying to create the captions manually.
Once I’ve uploaded the video to YouTube, I go to the edit captions section and upload the saved captions. I play the captions through and use YouTube’s interface to correct the errors that I didn’t notice inside of Premiere. This is my first effort at this process: The Symbols Section of Words’s Equation Tab.
It’s nice to have several tools available at once.
