Making video social media-ready

You've already seen this in your Facebook feed: videos that are captioned, usually with a color block behind the text. The captions are there because—unless you change your settings to prevent it—videos normally play automatically, and silently, as you scroll past them in your Facebook feed. This is why it is important to include captions.

So important, in fact, that I'd like you to include with your next video project, a 30-40 second captioned version for Facebook.

As we discussed in class, you can do this a few ways: You can create titles in your non-linear editor (Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or iMovie); you can use a plug-in for Adobe After Affects or Apple's Motion. Or, the simplest way is to create Open Captions in Adobe Premiere.

Open captions are similar to closed captions, except you can turn open and closed captions on and off. In case you missed it in class, here are some simple instructions for creating open captions:

Now that you know how to create them, you should also watch this brief video that gives you some dos and don'ts:

Finally, in case you want to make some really fancy captions (and you know your way around After Affects), you can use a third-party plug-in. I have this plug-in, so let me know if you want to use it. Here's what it can do: