Captioning footage that never had subtitles
Video shot before captioning was routine almost never carries a subtitle track, which is a problem the moment that footage needs to be published, submitted or made accessible. Training libraries, recorded proceedings and family archives all tend to arrive as bare AVI files with the words locked inside the audio.
Generating an SRT gives you those words back as a separate file sitting next to the video. Nothing about the original is altered, which matters when the footage is evidence or an archive master that has to stay untouched.
Reviewing captions from older audio
Archive audio is harder to caption than modern recordings, usually because a single camera microphone was capturing a whole room. Read through the SRT with the video playing before you publish it; caption errors are more visible than transcript errors because viewers see them against the speaker's face.
Concentrate your corrections on names, places and figures, which are both the most likely to be misheard and the most damaging to get wrong. Fixing them in the SRT is quick, since the file is plain text and each cue is clearly numbered and timed.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to burn the subtitles into the video?
No, and usually you should not. A separate SRT lets viewers turn captions off and lets you correct a mistake later without re-encoding the video, which would cost you quality every time.
How do I make a player show my SRT file?
Most desktop players pick it up automatically when the subtitle file sits in the same folder and shares the video's filename. Otherwise, load it manually from the player's subtitle menu.
Can I get a plain transcript as well as captions?
Yes. The same transcription exports as TXT, SRT and VTT, so you can take a readable document and a caption file from a single upload without transcribing the footage twice.