Imaginary Captions

Imaginary Captions is a tool for creating captions and subtitles for your movies, episodes, ads, and other digital video content.

Need to caption a film or series? Have a Facebook video you need to post? Create a project and load your film or series episodes into Imaginary Captions. You can even import any existing captions so you can fix them or work on translating them into other languages.

Download the application for MacOS from the Apple Store.

Features

  •  Organize your work into projects
  • Reference both local mp4 and mov files as well as videos hosted in streaming services like Brightcove, Vimeo, and Seeka TV.
  • Import existing captions (SRT, Web VTT, Amazon Transcribe) and improve them
  • Fast, keyboard-based workflow
  • Support for captioning in multiple languages
  • Export to SRT and Web VTT formats useful in Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Seeka TV, Brightcove, and more.

Help Topics

There are two core help documents:

  • Navigation
    • Projects
    • Media
    • Captions
  • Workflow
    • Starting from Scratch
    • Fixing Existing Captions
    • Translation

Once you're done entering all your captions, making sure they look good, and translating them into the appropriate languages, it's time to export them for use in your distribution strategy.

To export captions for a specific asset, select the asset in the Project Panel. Also, make sure the desired language is selected in the Captions Panel. 

Click File | Export Captions | [Format] to bring up a file save dialog box. Imaginary Captions currently supports exporting in SRT and Web VTT. The named platforms are just convenience menu items so you don't have to know whether your platform is SRT or Web VTT. If you care, however, Brightcove and Seeka TV are Web VTT and Facebook and YouTube are SRT. Thus, if you are exporting to Facebook, both File | Export Captions | Facebook and File | Export Captions | Generic SRT produce the same results.

The captions are saved to the file location you specify in the format you specify. You can then go and upload this file to your target platform.