What matters in practice
Many clients treat subtitles as an extra. On social platforms they are in fact the precondition for a film landing at all: most plays start muted there, and someone who has nothing to read scrolls on before they ever reach for the sound. An interview film without subtitles is, in a feed, a film without content.
Open or closed
- Open subtitles are rendered into the picture, “burnt in” in the jargon. They are always there, in every player, on every platform, with nothing required of the viewer. In exchange they cannot be switched off, corrected or translated without exporting the version again.
- Closed subtitles sit alongside the film as a separate file (SRT or VTT) and are switched on. They can be corrected, carry several languages and are readable by search engines. But they depend on the player supporting them and on someone enabling them.
As a rule of thumb: open for social, closed for your website and YouTube. Wherever you do not control the player we burn in; wherever you do, we supply the file. It costs nothing extra and turns a second language version into a piece of text work rather than a new export.
For viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, a good version goes beyond the words: it identifies who is speaking and names sounds that matter to comprehension. On films with several speakers, that difference is clearly felt.
What regularly goes wrong
- Automatic transcription is a serviceable first draft and a poor final result. Company names, product designations and technical terms are precisely what it gets wrong. Precisely the words that matter. Allow time for correcting it.
- Position. In feeds, the bottom third of the frame is covered by controls and captions. Subtitles belong higher up there.
- Pace. Two lines, not three, and condense rather than transcribe. A viewer who is reading is not watching.