The Importance Of Captions In Church Media

As a church that produces video and audio content, I understand the importance of captions in making sure that our content is accessible to all. With this article, I hope to offer some insights that can help other churches create more inclusive content for their audience.

Why Captions Are Important

Including captions in our media will benefit everyone. For example, they make Fairhaven’s content accessible to a wider audience, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing. Captions also benefit individuals who may not have access to sound, such as those in noisy environments or public places.

I have been using MacWhisper. It’s a macOS app that uses artificial intelligence from OpenAI to transcribe audio and video files into text. It supports multiple languages and it can also generate subtitles and timestamps. You can edit the transcripts and export them in various formats, such as SRT, VTT, Text, CSV, HTML and PDF.

Whisper is the original application from OpenAI that preforms the same functionality but uses the command-line. Both of these applications are free to use, however MacWhisper has a paid upgrade.

Another option that I have been using is DaVinci Resolve Studio It utilizes the DaVinci Neural Engine to create subtitles from audio, specifically analyzing English audio on the timeline to generate text captions automatically. DaVinci Resolve Studio is a video editing software that costs $300, but there is a free version available to start out with.