Instagram IGTV Video Subtitles

In this article, I’ll explain why you might want to add subtitles to your Instagram IGTV videos, where it might be best to put them, and how to do it.

Why have subtitles in Instagram IGTV videos?

There are several reasons to have subtitles on your Instagram IGTV videos:

  1. Accessibility: You’re making your video accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing.
  2. Environment: The viewer may be watching in an environment where they can’t turn on their phone’s speaker and they don’t have headphones handy.
  3. Thumb-stopping: You want to grab the viewer even if they haven’t turned on audio yet. This is more true when you’re trying to stop thumbs from scrolling past, so we’ll see how effective it is for Instagram IGTV over time.

Where to put your Instagram IGTV video subtitles?

Let’s talk about where to place your subtitles. I would suggest placing them outside of where the Instagram IGTV overlay is shown. Why would you want to do this if these overlays are hidden most of the time? It isn’t that the overlay obscures your subtitles when someone wants to bring up an overlay. After all, they probably don’t need to read your subtitles at that moment. But your subtitles, if positioned under the overlay, can make the overlay harder to read, as shown below:

Instagram IGTV Video Subtitles interfering with overlay text

So where exactly does this overlay get placed? Based on my measurements, the top of the overlay text, including your comment count is 345 pixels from the bottom of the 1920 pixel height image.

Instagram IGTV overlay dimensions

How to add subtitles to your Instagram IGTV video?

My process for adding subtitles to Instagram IGTV consists of 5 major steps:

  1. Upload your video

    2. Upload your video to a site like YouTube that will automatically generate closed captions.

    YouTube upload

  2. Download the SRT

    3. Download the SRT file that YouTube produced:

    1. Click the Subtitles/CC link.

      Click the Subtitles/CC link

    2. Choose from the list of subtitle options, if you’ve created more than one.

      Choose your subtitles

    3. Pop up the menu and pick the .srt option to download the SRT file.

      Click the .srt option

  3. Convert SRT to FCPXML

    4. Convert the SRT file to a FCPXML file. This can be done with tools like SubSimple to create the FCPXML file from your SRT file.

    1. From the SubSimple website, click the “SRT to FCPXML 1.5” button

      Choose SRT to FCPXML

    2. Choose the SRT file you previously downloaded.

      Choose your SRT file

    3. Click the “Send File” button to download the FCPXML.

      Click the Send File button

  4. Copy FCPXML Contents to Clipboard

    5. Import the FCPXML file into your non-linear editor of choice. For the free editor DaVinci Resolve there are three sub-steps.

    1. Open your video project, go to the Edit workspace (Shift + 4) and add a track on top of everything else for your subtitles to go. Note what track number it was.

      Add a new track on top

    2. Create a new, empty project. Import the fcpxml file and move the video track up to match where it would go in the other file.

      Move video track up to match

    3. Select all the subtitles (Command + A on Mac, Ctrl + A on Windows). Copy to clipboard (Command + C on Mac, Ctrl + C on Windows).

      Select all subtitles

    4. Reopen your original video, go to the Edit workspace (Shift + 4), move the red timeline position indicator to the start of the timeline, and paste (Command + V on Mac, Ctrl + V on Windows) from the clipboard.

  5. Resize and Reposition Your Subtitles

    6. No matter what non-linear editor you use, the last step is to adjust the size and position of your text and republish your video with burned-in captions. With Resolve, you position your text by selecting it and bringing up the inspector. I like to use white text against a dark background, so I create a track underneath the subtitles for the background and place a solid color generator from the Toolbox in the Effects library.

    Solid color generator

    Then I stretch the solid background to fill the timeline.

    Solid background stretched to fill timeline

    Next, I select the solid color background and bring up the Inspector.

    Inspector for the solid color background

    I want to make the background 134 pixels high, which is 7% of 1920, so I set the Zoom Y to 0.07.

    Set Zoom Y to 0.07

    Next, I position the 134 px height background so that it is just above the 345 px of overlay text. This puts the middle (67 px) of the background 412 px from the bottom. DaVinci Resolve measures this from the middle (960 px) of the 1920 px screen by default, so the background’s own middle should be 548 px down from the middle of the screen.

    Set position to -548 px

    For the subtitle text itself, I select all the subtitle text blocks in the timeline and use the Inspector to set the font size to 26.

    Set font size to 26

    The position is measured from the bottom of the screen, so I set the Y position to 412 px.

    Set Y position to 412 px

    Publish the final video in Resolve by going to the Deliver workspace (Shift + 8). Choose your render settings to be a Custom resolution of 1080 x 1920 px. Click the “Add to Render Queue” button and click the “Start Render” button.

    Render Settings - Custom Resolution for Instagram IGTV

Please let me know in the comments below whether or not this is useful for you and if there are any details I should be adding to make this article more helpful.