How to Add Captions to Vertical Videos

Over the past few years, social media has gone through a transformation shift from desktop to mobile. As we continue the move to a digital world that is more focused on mobile screens, social media has followed suit by focusing on "vertical videos", videos that generally falls around a 16:9 aspect ratio:

Snapchat was the first popular platform to utilize the vertical aspect ratio and focus solely on mobile screens. Instagram and Facebook weren't far behind, quickly launching "Stories" which focused on vertical photos and videos from people you follow that play in succession.

Given you are reading this article, you know that you need to be creating vertical content for social media. To put some stats behind the importance, research has shown that 79% of social media time is spent on mobile devices.

Creating vertical video content isn't a major challenge. However, every platform that supports vertical video (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.,) will automatically mute your video until the viewer taps the video or adjusts their volume. If you want someone to actually listen to your vertical videos, this can be a huge problem.

Here at Zubtitle, we are solely focused on helping video creators get the most views out of their content. That is why we built Zubtitle, an online tool that automatically adds captions to videos to overcome auto-mute and encourage viewers to listen. With our recent update, we now support automatically captioning vertical videos of any dimension or aspect ratio.

Using Zubtitle to Automatically Add Captions to Vertical Video

1. Create a Zubtitle account and upload your video

With our free account, you can create up to two videos per month. Simply upload your video file into Zubtitle by clicking on the yellow Add New Video button in the upper right-hand corner.

Zubtitle automatically transcribes the audio from your file and generates timed captions. It’s not magic, but it’s close.

2. Trim your video

As soon as you upload, you’ll have the option to trim your video’s length. Just use the sliding bar and click the Start Editing button when you’re done. You can also choose to skip the trimming step altogether.

3. Edit your captions

Speech-to-text technology isn’t 100% accurate. So it’s always a good idea to double-check your subtitles to make sure everything looks perfect. You can easily edit grammar or spelling, as well as adjust the timing of the captions, by using the simple point-and-click text editor. This is also the section where you can add a headline.

4. Style your video

You can use our Templates feature to quickly style your video by selecting a pre-made template from the Default list (there are multiple styles and sizing).

Or you can fully customize and brand your video by going down the side menu and selecting every feature yourself. You can add a headline, change text and background colors, upload your own custom fonts, fine-tune positioning, add a logo or progress bar, and more.

Remember that if you decide to customize your own video styling instead of choosing a pre-made template, you can save all of that styling as your own custom template so it will be all ready to go for your next video!

5. Generate your new video

Just select the download button in the upper-right hand corner to render your new video and download it to your computer or device.

Ready to add captions to vertical videos?

Sign up for a free Zubtitle account today to get started! With our free plan, you can create two videos per month. To create up to 10 videos per month (and remove the Zubtitle watermark), check out our standard plan.