Add Captions to Videos with Final Cut Pro for iPad

When I was teaching in the classroom, I often found playing videos quite difficult, because getting the sound right was really hard. There were always children at the back of the room that just couldn’t hear, and the speakers and the lag were never quite right. So, it’s always important to add subtitles or captions to your videos, so people can follow along with the words even if they can’t hear them fully.

Well, there’s a really easy way of doing this using the Final Cut Pro app on the iPad, and I’m going to show you how it works. And if you’ve not used Final Cut Pro before, don’t be scared. Yes, it’s a bit more complex than iMovie, but it’s really quite simple when you get started. I’ll guide you through the whole thing.

And if you’re new around here, then hi, I’m Jacob, a former computing teacher, and now I’m here on YouTube to help you make the most of your devices, both in the classroom and at home. So, if you want more QuickTips like this, please do press subscribe. Then you won’t miss any in your feed.

Okay, so I’ve got a video here that I recorded for my other YouTube channel, my main QuickTips channel, and I want to add some captions to it. We’re going to use the Final Cut Pro app for this, and to begin with, we’re going to import the old video. So, it’s not a video I’m making from fresh. It’s one that I’ve made already, or downloaded, or found somewhere else.

I’m going to tap Import Media at the top, choose Files, and then browse for it on the iPad. I know that mine’s saved in this folder. Yours might be in the Downloads folder, or wherever else you put it.

When you tap on it, that’s going to import it into Final Cut Pro, and we can simply drag it from the library in the corner down to the timeline at the bottom. It’s going to snap into place, and you can zoom in and zoom out to see how much you’ve got there.

Now, you can just press play on the left-hand side, and that will start playing that video. But obviously, you’re not going to have any captions yet, because we haven’t added them. You will, however, see the audio waveforms underneath, and that tells you there is audio there. We just want to be able to see it on the screen.

So, the next thing to do is to long-press on the actual clip in the timeline at the bottom of your screen. When you’ve done that, you should see a little menu pop up, and there’s an option there called Generate Captions. Give Final Cut Pro 20 seconds, maybe a minute at the most, to do this, and then you’re going to see these little purple boxes appear above your timeline.

Each of these is a different part of your text, broken up into captions. And if I press play now, you can see exactly what I mean. So, those captions have been created automatically for us, and we can now customise them and fine-tune them, to make sure they work exactly the way you want for your classroom and for your video.

What I’m going to do is tap and drag over all of those purple boxes in one go, to select all of them to edit at once. Then we’re going to press the Edit button in the bottom left-hand corner. This brings up a little toolbox, and we can go straight on to here to customise all the things about the element that we’ve selected, which in this case is our captions.

So, from here we can change the animation style. Do I want the words to appear by fading in? Do I want them to scale on the screen and get bigger as they’re read? Are they going to change colour? Well, I quite like the colour-changing option, actually. It draws attention to them.

And then we can change the font, the colour and the size, and you can even change the background colour of the little black box behind the text. In fact, we can get rid of it, or change the colour of the box. Everything about these subtitles is fully customisable, so have a little play here.

But when you’re done, if you go back to your main viewer and tap the play button again, you’ll notice it’s changed all of those captions to match the style you’ve just set.

Now, whilst this looks really good, you might find that some of the captions don’t transcribe exactly what you said, or perhaps they’re spelt wrong, or something like that. We can change this incredibly easily by simply tapping on one of the captions, and then, again, on that editing panel on the side, we can just delete the text and retype it there. That will update immediately on the timeline, and when you press play, your corrections should be visible.

So, now we’ve imported our film, we’ve made the captions, we’ve customised how they look and made sure they read perfectly as well. The final thing to do is to save that video back to your iPad’s Photos app, so you can use it however you like.

We can do that by tapping the name of the video here and then pressing Export. You can change all these settings if you really want to, but generally I leave them exactly as they are and press Export again. Then you can save it straight to the Photos app, or put it on whatever learning platform you’re using in your class.

And so, that’s a quick way of adding captions to your videos using Final Cut Pro for iPad. If you’ve enjoyed this video, please do press subscribe, and then you might want to check out this one next.