This guide walks you through the process of creating a transcript and synchronizing it to a video.

Creating your own captions is useful for media that has specialized or technical vocabulary, less than excellent audio quality, or a presentation or lecture you have given verbatim from a transcript.

Please note: you can only edit captions for YouTube videos if you have user access to the channel to which they were uploaded.

1. From the Channel content page in your YouTube Studio, click on the video you would like to caption.
   
   • If you are having trouble finding the YouTube Studio, go to  studio.youtube.com. 
2. On the Video details page, click on the Subtitles button in the left-side column. 
   
3. Click the Add Language button and choose English or English (United States) from the pick list. 
   
4. The language you chose will show up as a new row in the table. From here click the Add button in the Subtitles column. 
   
5. The captioning interface will appear. Choose Auto-sync and check the Pause while typing box below the video.
   
   • If the Auto-sync feature is not yet available on a newly uploaded video, you may need to wait for the video to finish processing.
6. Play your video and begin transcribing by using our  transcription guidelines in the box to the left of the video.
   • You will notice that the video pauses once you start typing.
   • You may also copy and paste a transcript that you have already created. You will still need to edit the captions and timings according to the  caption editing guidelines.
   • Useful keystrokes include:
     • Shift + Spacebar to pause or play the video
     • Shift + left arrow to go back 1 second in the video.
   • Note that if you need to leave in the middle of transcription, click the Save Draft button to save your progress.
7. Once you have finished typing up the transcript, click the Edit timings button above the text box. 
   
   • As you were typing up the transcript, YouTube was taking its best guess at where the transcript fits with the audio of the video.
8. On this page, edit each caption by following our  caption editing guidelines.
   • Useful keystrokes include:
     • Enter to break one caption into two captions where your cursor is on the timeline.
     • Shift + Enter to move words to the next line within the  same caption.
9. Once you have edited the captions to your liking, click the Publish button in the upper right side of the interface. 
   

You are now ready to share your captioned YouTube video!