TOPIC:

Simple question. But I worry the answer isnt simple. I have subtitles and need to make a SRT file for Youtube. (I don't want to use Youtube automated subtitles cause the language is not easy to make out).
What's the best way to make an SRT file?

I went to the page on Apple's website for instructions of how to do this but when I go to the File menu, export captions is greyed out.....

You can make your own caption and export it as .srt

or use a transcriber app, I personally use this free one

goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

But there are plenty out there, just google it.

good luck

Yes. MacWhisper. Free. Creates SRT file but also will create a transcript text file without all the time stamp encumbrances. Export as audio only then that into MW avoids lengthy video rendering if it's not needed.

Lately, I've been using Captions **instead of** Titles in Final Cut for YouTube videos. They can be automatically translated to different languages.

When I export my project, I have to go into the Roles section and check the Export each SRT language as a separate file (or no captions are exported.) DO NOT check Include text formatting.

At this point... no matter what I've done, I still get SRT captions with HTML/XML formatting, which is something you do not want on YT. What I do is open the SRT file in BBEdit (or TextWrangler if you still have it) and open the Find dialog. In the Grep menu ('g'), I created a "regex" expression to find XML formatting and use Replace All to get rid of it all.

This is the regex:
Find:
<font.*\>(.*|.*\r.*)<\/font>
Replace:
\1

(No leading or trailing spaces...)

Save the file right over the original. It can now be uploaded to YT as "clean" SRT.