Skip to Main Content
Pollak Library

Camtasia resources: Captions

A Guide offering an introduction to Camtasia

For the most part, it's recommended to leave the audio effects alone, with the notable exception of captioning. For accessibility, captions are required on any video with voice narration. There are two recommended ways of adding captions to your video:

  • Adding hard-coded captions in Camtasia - This method will embed captions directly into the file. It requires you to manually add your transcribe your words or to cut-and-paste from a script if you use one. This is definitely one of several advantages to using a script.
  • Use YouTube's automatically generated captioning - When you upload it there. This is definitely the easier option, and YouTube's transcribing tool is definitely one of the more accurate ones. The downside is that if you choose to move the video or host it elsewhere, you'll still have to add captions to it.

See below for more detail. 

Captioning options

Begin by adding captions to the audio track in your timeline, as seen below. The audio track might be on its own or combiend with video. In either case, audio tracks can be identified by the audio levels shown in them on the timeline. 

After that, an audio track split up into little sections will appear on your audio track. Each section will be a separate caption. Clicking on any particular section will allow you to type in the text. You can change the length of each caption by dragging the divisions on the track or using the slider above it.

Animated GIF showing how captions can be added to an audio track in Camtasia

Setting your video to auto-generate captions is relatively simple. Just make sure that the language is selected to English and as long as the video is posted publicly, the captions will generate themselves. 

To set this up after the video has been uploaded, follow these instructions:

1. Upload video to YouTube

2. Click on your user icon in the top right corner and select "YouTube Studio"

Image of YouTube link to YouTube Studio

 

3. Once there, look in the bar on the left of the screen for "Subtitles"

Image of YouTube Studio navigated to "Subtitles" section

 

4. Once there, look at the "Languages" column. If you click on an entry in that column, it will show you the assigned languages. Below, we can see that English is selected for the language for my video, and on the right it tells us that subtitles are set to "automatic."

Image of YouTube Studios subtitle selection

 

5. If there isn't a language selected for your video, you can click on the video title where it will take you to a page where you can add one. 

Image of how to add a language to a video in YouTube Studio

 

For more information, see this step-by-step tutorial from the OET.

Other audio effects

Image of the Audio Effects menu in CamtasiaAudio Compression - Allows you to fine-tune the audio levels on your movie. This isn't really recommended for new users, but can be helpful for making audio clearer / louder.

Noise Removal - This isn't as helpful as I wish it was, but it can be useful for cleaning up some background noises.

Pitch - Unless you really have issues with the sound of your voice, I'd recommend leaving this feature alone.

Fade In / Fade Out - This is helpful when you're using a soundtrack, but otherwise doesn't offer much.

Clip Speed - This has some helpful applications, primarily speeding up demonstrative clips