No more pausing and rewinding videos or frantically scribbling down notes. No more spending hours and hours of your precious time with video transcriptions. No matter if you’re a student trying to keep up with notes from your recorded classes, a social media content creator, or just a creative spirit looking to experiment with video to text transcription, we’ve got you covered. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about how to efficiently use a video to text converter.
Can you extract text from videos?
The short answer is YES! The long story is one of technology advancing and becoming a handy tool that saves time and effort. There are two methods that enable you to separate text from videos, so let’s take a look at them:
Manual video to text transcription
The more traditional way involves you pulling up two separate tabs or even screens. Then, you’d have to press play and instantly pause, so you can switch tabs and write down a transcription of the entire dialogue in a document.
But that entirely defeats the purpose of efficiently extracting text from videos, right?
Automatic video to text transcription
There’s always a solution that can help you see the light at the end of the tunnel—or rather, the end of the tiresome transcription process. Technology has come a long way, and repetitive, tedious tasks like handwritten (or hand-typed, for that matter) transcriptions are a thing of the past. There are tools that leverage artificial intelligence to effortlessly convert video to text, all while you sit back, relax, and enjoy a cup of coffee.
Why convert video to text?
If you’re wondering why would people need to extract text from video, we’ve narrowed down a list of reasons that highlight the benefits of video transcription.
Enhance accessibility
Any creator’s primary focus should be ensuring that their content is accessible to all audience members. A video to text converter is a handy tool that helps enhance accessibility for people with hearing impairments and neurodivergent individuals who might have a hard time following videos without written visual aids.
Repurpose content
Great, you’ve published a video on YouTube! Now, all that’s left is creating a repurposing plan for your other social media accounts, such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or others. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to skim through the transcript, find keywords or memorable phrases, and have a caption idea all ready to go?
Boost searchability
Speaking of keywords, if video SEO isn’t already part of your content strategy, you’ll be glad to learn there are ways to increase your video’s online visibility. Including a video transcript can boost your content’s online presence significantly because while search engines cannot yet properly scan a video, they will gladly index a video transcript.
Ease translation
Reaching international audiences shouldn’t be a hassle, so many creators resort to a video text extractor for a streamlined translation process. After all, it doesn’t get easier than copying and pasting text and then using a translator to break down language barriers. Even better, there are video editors out there that have built-in subtitle translation features, but we’ll get more into that later.
Boost productivity
Instead of investing countless hours into pausing, rewinding and writing down the dialogue from a video by hand, you could be doing countless other creative activities. That’s how a video to text converter can help by saving time and effort, so you can be more productive with fun tasks.
Step-by-step guide to extracting text from video
Theory is all fun and games, but practice makes perfect. Let’s start with an example by using an online video to text converter that’s part of an essential creative stack many marketers, content creators, academia staff, podcast editors and other professionals approve of and recommend:
Step 1: Power up Flixier
It doesn’t matter if you’re working on a sleek MacBook, a powerful gaming laptop, a ChromeOS or really any other device as long as you can open up a browser tab. All you need for Flixier to run is a steady internet connection, so pull open a browser tab, go to flixier.com, and tap the blue Get Started button.
Step 2: Import videos
Flixier’s import process is seamless from one end to the other. Click the Import button to bring over videos, images, audio tracks, or GIFs directly from your computer. This tool is highly compatible with many file formats, so you don’t need to worry about converting videos before you upload them. Some of the supported formats are MOV, MP4, AVI, WMV, MKV and many others.
Step 3: Convert video to text
You can drag and drop your video onto the timeline section. Make any cuts or edits you need before you start converting the video to text. Select the video track on the timeline, right-click on it and click Generate subtitles.
Step 4: Customize video subtitles
If you wish to directly export the extracted text, you can skip to the next step.
If you plan on using the extracted text as subtitles for your video, you can start exploring Flixier’s rich caption customization capabilities. Choose your favorite from over 1000 font families or upload your own font. Adjust the subtitle weight, placement, and colors to stay true to your branding or match your video’s mood. You can also translate subtitles in over 130 languages without leaving Flixier’s interface.
Step 5: Save your text
To download your text, you need to select the subtitle track on the timeline, then head to the Subtitle section in the right side of the interface. Under the Download Text or Subtitle field you’ll see a dropdown menu. You can choose your preferred text format, be it TXT, SRT, SUB, VTT or another. Then, click the download button next to it and you are good to go.
To recap, generating transcriptions with a video to text converter is a real ace up your sleeve if you’re looking to efficiently streamline your workflow. Make the most of your content and choose an option that helps you save time and effort, so you can focus on the creative magic that goes on behind the scenes. With the right tool and a little bit of practice, you’ll be working like a pro in no time!