Adding captions to my porn has been a long-term goal of mine. I want my filth to be accessible to people who are Deaf or hard of hearing, after all! While it’s true that the visuals are a large part of the appeal, sometimes I explain what I’m doing, describe the sensations, or simply indulge in fantasy and dirty talk.
Also, many of my loyal viewers don’t speak English as their first language. I feel lucky to have such an international audience! In the throes of passion, I know I don’t always enunciate clearly, and so I hope that captions will help with clarity if someone can’t quite understand what I’m saying. Personally, my very limited knowledge of the language sometimes lets me understand written Spanish, but I generally can’t follow spoken Spanish, so if I’m trying to watch something in Spanish I always want the captions on!
Why did it take me so long to start adding captions?
If I think it’s so important, then, why didn’t I do this sooner? Well, it’s a substantial time investment. In the past, I’ve tried the automated transcription features of a couple of different editing programs, and found it simply too laborious: the automated captions required painstaking corrections which the software didn’t make particularly easy to perform. In addition, needing to export a project from my main editing software and move it into another program is exactly the type of process I strive to avoid! If I discover anything that I want to change, that means moving back to my editing software, fixing it, re-exporting, and often having to start my captioning work all over.
Recently, though, I upgraded from the free to the studio edition of DaVinci Resolve, my usual editing software. This wonderful change was made possible by a generous fan, who is having quite an impact on my workflow! DaVinci Resolve Studio offers automatic transcription as a feature, and refining the captions is easier to build into my editing process now that I can stay in one program. Also, the rest of my workflow has become faster, so although editing the captions takes a fair bit of time, it feels easier to dedicate that time to it.
DaVinci Resolve’s subtitle generation absolutely does still make mistakes, though- sometimes mistakes that I find bewildering! Who are Griffin and Bergie?!
In fact, although Resolve’s AI subtitle generation does fairly well with my words, I write all of the descriptions of noises that you see in my captions. DaVinci Resolve can usually understand most of my speech, but it’s just not designed for porn audio! (If someone develops a third party plugin which optimizes it for sex noises, please do let me know, that is definitely relevant to my interests.) Much of the time I spend on my captions is focused on taking them from the first image below to the second:
![The same still from a video, showing my hands obscuring my genitals in order to manipulate a toy. Caption reads "[rhythmic noise of thrusting toy continues]"](https://i0.wp.com/strangecares.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Snapshot_186.png?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1)
Wait, are they captions or subtitles?
Editing software tends to refer to them as subtitles. For instance, the menu item in DaVinci Resolve is “Create Subtitles from Audio” and they’re referred to as such all through the program.
However, traditionally there’s a distinction between subtitles and captions. Subtitles display dialogue, and generally translate it into another language, the basis of “subs vs. dubs” debates. Captions, on the other hand, are typically intended to contain all the information someone would gain by listening to the audio: dialogue, but also sounds and music.
“Closed captioning” refers to captions you can choose to turn on or off, like on YouTube or Netflix. Sadly, I don’t know of any porn sites with that option, so in order to offer captions I have to do “burnt in” or open captions, and I upload a whole second video in order to let people choose whether to watch with captions.
I asked friends for their thoughts about captions too!
While I’ve been working toward this goal, I’ve been noticing which peers have already been offering videos with captions. When I decided to write this post, I asked a few creators I deeply admire whether they would be willing to answer a couple of questions about captioning porn.
Miss Devora Moore, also known as Octogoddess, is a lifestyle Mommy Domme, a silver-haired cougar temptress, and a sadistic tickling fetishist. She films videos, takes phone calls, and offers both online and in-person sessions. You can find her website at octogoddess.com
Bet, also known as narratophile, is a subversive goddess, an anarchist, a chess enthusiast, a bountiful milkmaid, and a daily Twitch streamer. She creates videos as well as offering phone calls, sexting, and in-person sessions. Learn more about her at subversive.space
Eryn Rose is an adult performer, an exhibitionist, a lifestyle submissive, and a keen sadomasochist. Eryn self produces videos, performs in videos produced by other filmmakers, and models for art nude and bondage photography. Their website is at erynrose.co.uk
I’m so grateful to be able to share their thoughts with you here!
What surprises emerged when you started adding captions?
Miss Devora Moore: “One thing I’ve been enjoying a lot is describing my farts in my captioned farting clips. I like to sometimes put very descriptive language in parenthesis to provide the immersive experience with some of my audio. I often employ binaural loops, effects and distortions to accompany many of my solo clips. I actually used a thesaurus to describe my farts in creative and colorful language for those who use captions due to hearing difficulty or loss. That’s how I learned that “petarade” is a word for a series of farts! I even include it in a captioned fart video which is a fun way of educating my customers. I wonder how many will look up the word when they see it!”
Eryn Rose: “I think people don’t realise how long it takes, and costs. I create auto-generated captions in DaVinci Resolve Pro to speed up the process, but I still send those files to a real human, who will usually spend several hours tidying them up, making corrections, and improving the formatting, before they come back to me and I spend at least an hour myself checking them and filling in any last bits my captioner couldn’t make out. I would love to release the captioned version at the same time as the main release, but I so far haven’t been able to accommodate all the extra time and work this would add before every release.
I think many people are surprised to learn that most adult sites don’t have the functionality for embedded closed captions, meaning I can’t just add a subtitle file to an existing film, like you would do on YouTube, I have to render a second version with the captions actually burnt into the video and upload it as a second film. This is really annoying to me because it makes it harder for customers to find the subtitled versions, and gives the buyers less options of how they want to view the subtitles. For example with captions on youtube you can chose text colour, background, size, and position on the screen. With burnt in captions the formatting I burnt it in with is what you get, and that’s it, no option to adjust for different people’s needs.
I spent quite a bit of time selecting the colours which I use to show different people talking in a scene. In a vanilla TV show the camera usually focuses on the face of the person speaking, so it’s clear who is saying what without needing different colours or to constantly include the speakers’ name in the captions. However in my films, frequently it is much less clear who is speaking, and in some scenes there are several people speaking at once for a lot of the film. This I why I use colours to make it clearer who is saying what, but I spent a lot of time trying to make sure those colours would remain distinguishable to people with most kinds of colour blindness. I hope I succeeded at that, but I’ve not actually received feedback on it from any colourblind viewers so I can’t be certain I got it right.”
Bet: “When I started doing it I was surprised by how much time and effort it took. Initially, I didn’t have access to any sort of auto captioning, so I had to write everything carefully myself. It could take hours to fully caption a 10 minute video. Now that I use Capcut to start the captioning process and then modify them by hand, it’s a much faster (if less artful) process.”
What has the response been from your fans to your captioned videos?
Bet: “I think most of my fans are ambivalent to whether or not I add captions, but the ones that like it REALLY like it. They enjoy the extra layer of description, especially when I make the extra effort to describe specific sounds.”
Eryn Rose: “The captioned versions of my films do sell ok, but as they usually go out later, they tend not to sell as much as the first release of the same film.
I do wish buyers talked to me more about captions. Especially if there are specific films they’re waiting on a captioned version of. If I know a film is wanted, I will happily prioritize that one over others, and I’m currently releasing films faster than I can caption them, so if I’m not told, there’s a good chance it could be years before the one you’re holding out for gets done.”
Is there any advice you’d offer someone who’s considering adding captions to their videos?
Bet: “My advice is to start off with shorter videos and don’t be afraid to add a little extra personality to the descriptions, but just remember to keep them useful and concise for the people that truly need it.”
Eryn Rose: “Auto-generated captions are pretty good these days. Don’t rely on them, but they make a good starting point. I generate my subtitles in DaVinci, as I already bought the studio version, but then I process them in Subtitle Edit as I find that way easier to use for the editing part.
I do think that, for me at least, going through the film once after I’ve had it back from the captioner is necessary, as there may be things which are very unclear in the audio, but I can work out what was said from memories of the shoot itself.”
Miss Devora Moore: “The AI speech to text converters are very good but you will still have to go through and check each word. It can be a little time consuming but I use it to help me create my teaser as I add timeline markers when I discover a line I really like. Also you will want to make sure when you frame your shots that you leave enough at the bottom to add the captions without getting in the way of the good stuff! In that case sometimes I will move where the captions are displayed. Another thing I love to do is screenshot some of the captions for funny single frame lulz and even use captioned versions for gifs so people know what I said.”
Do you look for captioned porn?
If captions are something you seek out in the porn you enjoy, take a look at what Bet, Devora, Eryn, and I are creating!
I’m steadily working to release more porn with captions, and I’ve switched my thumbnail style to make it easy to see which ones are captioned: just look for the “captions” label in the top left of the video thumbnail.
Are you hoping that I’ll re-release a clip from my back catalog with captions added? Drop me a note and let me know!
And please, let us know that captions were part of why you chose our videos: all three of these thoughtful folks mentioned to me that they’d like to hear more feedback from fans about their captioned videos. We want to bring you pleasure, and captions are part of that effort! Let us know what works for you.