Camtasia Captioning Tips

UPDATE September 1, 2025:  While the techniques described below work for manually creating captions, if you haven't tried the new Dynamic Captions you are missing out.  Dynamic Captions are an amazing feature, easy to use, and so much faster to complete than manual captions.  Give Dynamic Captions a try!

While you can manually add closed captions, Camtasia provides some nice tools for quickly captioning your videos.  Here are some tips and workflow ideas that I have found helpful.

1. Open Notepad on your computer and create a "ruler" for the number of caption lines you want.  For example, for a single line of captions, your ruler would be 42 characters long, like this:
   
   123456789012345678901234567890123456789012
   
   If you want two lines of captions, that would be 84 characters.
2. Paste your entire script into Notepad below the ruler.
3. Insert line breaks (Enter key) at natural breath points at locations less that the length of your ruler.  Usually commas, periods, and phrases are good places to break the line.
4. Move the playhead to the start of your video.
5. Once you have your script prepared for captions, select all of the text in Notepad, and Add Caption under the Captions section in Camtasia, pasting your entire script into a single caption.
6. From the gear icon in Captions, select Sync Captions and follow the instructions.  you will click on the first word of each line of the script as you listen to the narration.
7. This will get your captions pretty close, but the timing will not perfect.  Drag your narration track until it is just beneath your captions.  This will allow you to see the audio waveform in relation to the start of each caption.  
8. Drag each caption's starting frame line to correspond to that part of the audio waveform.  Scrub back before the caption break, then listen and watch to make sure the caption timing is perfect.

It is a little easier for me to see the script lines to click on during the Sync Captions process, if I put an extra blank line between the script lines in Notepad before I copy and paste the script.  That does mean you will have to delete that blank line when you are doing your final alignment, but it is not a big deal.

Here is another tip, learned the hard way.  If you have a long video, it is much easier to caption sections of the video at a time, rather than attempting to use Sync Captions to create a single long caption line.

To learn how to use the Sync Captions feature, follow this link to the TechSmith support page on captions, and scroll down to the Sync Captions video.  You will never manually add each caption again!