5 elements you must consider when adding subtitles to videos

4/17/2023

Today, any Youtuber understands the power of subtitles, especially if they are expanding their target and attracting audiences from different countries.

Subtitles can increase viewership, boost SEO rankings, and make sharing your videos on social media channels easier.

However, if you just add subtitles without thought, like subtitles cover pictures, timing doesn’t match scenes, subtitles font size is too small. Then it can give backfire and do more harm.

Therefore, investing some time to create easy-to-read, attractive subtitle is an essential factor to care about.

And to make it possible, don’t ignore the following factors.

1. Font style

The first factor to consider when adding subtitles to a video is font style. The font used should be easy to read. Sans Serif is a pretty much-recommended font, it’s a font without lines after the characters.

Sans Serif is a favorite font because text overlaid on video reacts differently on the eye than printed text. While Serif fonts distort on top of video, Sans Serif fonts will hold the shape better on moving images.

Some of the most commonly used Sans Serif fonts include Universe 45 Light, Antique Olive, Tiresias ScreenFont, and PT Sans. These all work well on moving images, they’re super thin and don’t have decorative flares.

In addition, using familiar subtitles fonts like these will also help your audience read and recognize the typeface easily. They won’t need to use a lot of brainpower to analyze and process what they are seeing.

5 elements you must consider when adding subtitles to videos

The font style used should be easy to read

Don’t miss >> The 13 best subtitle fonts that help to improve your video engagement

2. Font size

Besides font style, font size is the next factor to consider. As for font style, font size should be clear to read, especially to people who prefer watching videos without sound.

To make your videos platform-friendly, you need to choose a font size that can be viewed easily on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Adjusting the font size is extremely important, and it may take you a few tries to find the right font size.

3. Subtitles color

Again, we want to emphasize the importance of subtitle readability. And not only font style and font size, but subtitle color is also another solid thing that you must choose carefully.

A video or a movie has a lot of different shots. Each shot may have a different background color. For example, if you choose white subtitles, everything will look fine if it runs against a black-tone background. But in the next scenes, if the background is white, your subtitles will be submerged into the background and unreadable.

Therefore, you’d better choose a consistent subtitles color, which can be seen well on both light and dark backgrounds. A compelling and quite popular option is to use a white font with a black border.

This will make your subtitles readable on any background color, even on a regular black and white background.

Subtitle color is also another solid thing that you must choose carefully

4. Subtitles placement

Where to place the subtitles on the screen is also very vital to the success of your video. Many people put the subtitles on the bottom of the frame to prevent subtitles from overlapping the image.

However, most videos, including Youtube, are web-based, they use the bottom tenth of the screen to place the control buttons, so if you add subtitles to this area, viewers can’t read subtitles.

Instead, leave the subtitles at the bottom ⅔ of the video, in the center of the frame.

5. Duration

The last factor in this list is subtitles duration. You should let the subtitles stay 2 seconds longer than it takes you to read them so that your audience can comprehend all subtitles.

If the subtitles are displayed for less than 2 seconds, viewers won’t have enough time to grasp the text, and subtitles do nothing here.

How to add subtitles to videos?

In the past, adding subtitles to videos can be quite complicated and took time, a few skills to use subtitles software. Today, anyone can generate subtitles to videos with free online subtitles software, typically Motionbear.

With Motionbear, you can easily add subtitles to your videos in just a few minutes. Motionbear allows you to edit fonts, text colors, and subtitles sizes with only a few simple clicks.

Motionbear can also resize your video to fit different social networking platforms such as Instagram Stories, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram Portrait.

It can also work well on Windows, macOS, IOS, Android, and other web browsers.

It won’t take you much time to adjust timing because Motionbear matches timing and each video scene. The finished video is not affected after having subtitles as well.

Motionbear has free, pro and premium packages that cost $19/month and $190/year for the Pro version; $45/month and $450/year for the Premium version.

You can try Motionbear’s free version to experience its features.