Change font size and position of captions in FCPX

[Oliver Peters]

Are you using FCPX’s native captioning function? If so, captions are different from subtitles. Captions are designed for closed captioning and so your formatting options are limited. Is that what you want and does your target delivery support embedded or sidecar captions? Or were you intending to end up with actual on-screen subtitles (open captions)?

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Andreas Kiel]

Tom,

Not completely true. Captions & subtitles could be the same in some cases.
Subtitles in most cases describe visual text for spoken words. Captions in common usage includes “audio description”.
As an example: With a documentary where 2 languages are spoken (English, Spanish) there would be Spanish subtitles for the English text in the Spanish version, English subtitle text for Spanish words.
The “audio description” version does contain both plus things like “door bell ringing”.

Difference has to made between Closed Captions & Open Captions – as you said.

Latter are part of the visual content (burned into the video) the other (Closed Captions) are either embedded into the AV stream (CEA in Northern America & Mexico) or are side car files. The visibility can be turned on/off by the user. There may be multiple streams of them.
The appearance of Closed Captions is defined by the playback device and by default have little or no option to make changes.

@ Scott
Since FCP 10.4.8 the “native caption” function can be used for both types.
While PPro allows to switch behaviour between CC & OC – so you have some visual style options for OC – FCP doesn’t. Doesn’t mean that PPro is better ?

In both cases you can convert them to ‘Titles’ if you want to use full style Open Captions using 3rd party apps.

Spherico
http://www.spherico.com/filmtools

\”He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.\” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Scott Witthaus]

Thanks all!

[Brett Sherman]

For social media what you need is an .srt file if you don’t want the captions “burned” into the image. You can simply export the captions as an SRT file. You don’t have much control over how it renders, as it’s completely dependent on Facebook or Youtube to control text size, position etc. The advantage of using SRTs for social media is that captions appear if audio is turned off. Once the user turns on audio the captions disappear. You have to upload, the SRT file when you upload the video file. I rarely open caption Facebook or Youtube, but always upload an SRT. I think like 85% of viewers never turn audio on.

If you want it “burned in” then you’ll want to use something like “Final SRT” to convert from captions to titles. Currently Instagram has no srt capability, so I always open caption those. It’s also good practice to deliver 9×16 vertical video for IGTV. So for IGTV I usually drop a square video in the middle, with a text title at the top and captions rendered underneath the video.