CEA 608/708 Subtitles from AI Transcription
Simon Says outputs CEA 608/708-compliant subtitles/captions
Captioning your videos ensures accessibility so you reach a wider audience by supporting those with hearing difficulties. Subtitles also help to reach more people by allowing speakers of different languages to follow the onscreen action in their native language.
CEA 608 and 708 are captioning standards set by the FCC.
CEA 608 is the older standard and analog TVs support only 608. Since the digitization of TV signals in the US, the FCC approved CEA 708 as the new digital standard. CEA 708 has a lot more options when compared to 608 - including support for more languages because of support for special characters, font options, text sizes, background colors and transparency, and positioning of captions. CEA 608 supports 32 characters per line and a maximum of 2 lines per caption. 708 supports a maximum of 3 lines per closed caption.
Subtitles and captions created in Simon Says are CEA 608 and 708 compliant by default.
Simon Says subtitles are also super flexible. Set the number of characters per line, between 20–70 characters per line and choose whether you want one or two lines per subtitle card. You can also force text to be in all uppercase.
When using our transcript editor, it can be difficult to visualize how your subtitle will appear on-screen.
So we built the Visual Subtitle Editor. Go to the Export screen and click the “Visual Subtitle Editor” icon.
A new project will be created (with an appendix to the project name “SUBTITLED”) where your transcript is now formatted for subtitling. And like the transcript editor, the visual subtitle editor allows you to add and edit text and combine and split rows.
When you’re happy with how it all looks: export to subtitle options such as SRT, SRT for Facebook or YouTube, WebVTT, SAMI, Avid SubCap, and FCPXML Captions. (There is NO cost to export to a subtitle file.)
The file you download will look exactly as it did on screen.
We also have a paid option where you can burn-in the subtitles onto your video. This option is helpful when you want to force subtitles to appear on-screen such as for social media or in a corporate video you are sending to others.
To choose this option, go to the Export screen and select “Burn-In”.
