I recently needed to add closed captioning to a YouTube video, and – while I’d done it a long time ago and vaguely recalled there were shortcuts I’d used to make the process go faster – I couldn’t find any reference to them online to refresh my memory. YouTube itself isn’t much help – their bare-bones description of the captioning process sticks to describing the basic functionality of the available tools and interface, but doesn’t go any further.

The truth is, once in the typing interface, there’s a few keyboard shortcuts and techniques that are essential to keep the process moving along smoothly and quickly. But it’s not clearly spelled out anywhere. I’ll fix that now!

Getting started

To start captioning, you’ll want to be in edit mode, either while uploading your video, or by accessing it afterwards via YouTube Studio. Click “Subtitles” over on the right:

YT tries to add captions itself, but that’s not too helpful here, so we’re going to discard its suggested text and do a precise, manual job. Delete the text that comes up and click “Edit timings”:

Next, click the “Pause while typing” checkbox. Finally, click the New Caption (“+ Caption”) button at upper left to start your first caption. . Things should now look something like this:

The process now works as follows:

1. At first, there will be a single, empty caption box to the left of the video, ready to type your first caption into. The cursor should be blinking in it (if not, just click in it).
2. Use “Shift+spacebar” to play the video, and listen to the next phrase or sentence – as much as you want on your first  subtitle.  Pause the video just after your desired phrase (again with shift-spacebar.) You can rewind or fast-forward 5 seconds with”Shift-[left arrow] / [right arrow]”.
3. For this first caption, you can simply type in what you heard. Then…
4. Hit the Enter key (note: not the Return key). Your caption is confirmed and a new, blank caption box is created, ready for your next bit of dialogue.
5. Play the video using the shortcut, stop when you’ve heard enough for a caption, and type in what you just heard.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 to proceed with the captioning!

Some notes:

– To manually adjust the video playhead / caption insertion point, use the playhead in the timeline on the bottom – drag it where you want to move the video to. It’s the small dot with a line extending down over the timeline.

• To adjust the length of a caption, enter new numbers in the caption’s in or out point. If you highlight just the seconds, the up and down-arrow keys will change the numbers, and hitting Tab will make the change.
• You’ll see the captions appear as grey boxes with white text on the timeline. You can grab and drag these directly to move them. In theory, you can also hover over either end of the caption and adjust its start and end point once you see a skinny arrow. However, I find that process quite finicky so you may want to stick to adjusting the numbers.
• If you click in the text box of a previous caption, the video playhead / caption insertion point will move there. So generally you’ll avoid doing that when first entering captions (and make all the small adjustments later).
• As you’re editing, you’ll sometimes need to move the playhead. When you do so, the next caption needs to be created by clicking “+ Caption”, or the little “plus” sign on the lower left of the last caption box. The “Enter” key only works for creating a new caption if the cursor is already in a caption box. 

And that’s about it! You should pretty quickly develop some muscle-memory that will have you blazing through the captioning process.

How did these tips work for you? Let me know in the comments!