Trouble seeing/getting automatic subtitles for Youtube video

[Neil Orman]

I have an interview-based video, which I uploaded to Youtube, and I’m trying to get to the automatically generated subtitles so I can fix any issues. And for some reason I can’t see or get to these automatically generated subtitles, even after uploading the video several times to see if it was a fluke. I’m not sure if this is an issue with Youtube Studio, because when I had a choice I always used Youtube old/classic creator studio (where I used to do this with no problem). Youtube seems to have taken away that option, so I’ve tried to use Studio and still can’t see these subtitles when I go to the captions place, or they’re not generating for some reason. I’ve googled the issue but still can’t figure this out, so I’m grateful for any tips here!
Thanks, Neil

[Mark Suszko]

I hope you’re wrong because I depend on that a lot. I’m still finding I can get to classic via an account I made the Chrome, but in Safari I’m hitting your same problem. I haven’t had to do the captioning for a couple of weeks, so now you have me wondering… I’ll try to test this and report back but it will take some days.

[Mark Suszko]

So I found this and it looks like auto-caption is still there, they just make you go thru a bunch more steps to work with it now… and no longer offers .srt and .vtt file options, meaning more conversion work (sigh) which is why I preferred Classic…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcHIZ9aI9TA

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[Neil Orman]

Hi again Mark! I appreciate this other resource you suggested very much. I actually discovered an imperfect but workable solution within Youtube. Apparently its auto-captioning option has trouble when there’s a long period at the beginning of a video with no spoken words, and just silence or music. And I had 15 seconds or so of just music when I originally uploaded. So to get around that issue, I uploaded a new version, with that dialogue-free prelude cut out just to capture the subtitles. Then Youtube recognized the new version’s speech quickly, and generated an auto-captioned version. However, this workaround is time consuming, requiring one to then download that file and bring it into the original uploaded version, with the music/titles prelude included. But that’s the only fix I could come up with, within Youtube anyway. Let me know if you or others have found other solutions, though. And I’ll check out this other resource, thanks again Mark!
I hope you’re well.
Neil

[Michael Sieb]

You can check out Type Studio. It is a text-based video editor that allows adding subtitles with just one click. You can also export the SRT files if you want to use them somewhere else.

https://typestudio.co/

[Mark Suszko]

Had a thought regarding your problem of having silence or music up front… make a sub-dub of the track and add throw-away dialog just to fill that hole. When you get the timed SRT from YouTube, just delete the filler part.

[Neil Orman]

That is a great suggestion, thank you Mark! I hope all is well!