Use case
Captions for courses and webinars
Recorded teaching lives a long life: modules get watched in silence on trains, revisited before exams, and audited for accessibility. Captions are what make recordings useful in all three cases and the recording usually contains material you can't upload anywhere.
Why captions are non-negotiable for teaching video
Learners watch course material in contexts where sound is unavailable or unwelcome, libraries, commutes, shared rooms. Accessibility standards expect captions on recorded instruction. And captions measurably help retention of technical vocabulary, because the term is heard and read at the same time. For teaching content, captions are not a garnish on the video; they are part of the material.
Student work and internal material stays on your device
Webinar recordings include audience questions, screen shares with internal data, names and student submissions. Uploading such a recording to a captioning service is a compliance conversation. OneDrop's transcription sidesteps it: the recording is decoded in your browser and the video file never leaves your device, only the compressed audio is transcribed on the server and deleted right after processing. The privacy guide explains how to verify that claim yourself.
The files a course platform actually wants
Learning platforms differ in what they accept, so the studio exports all of it from one transcript: VTT for HTML5 players and most LMS platforms, SRT for everything else, burned-in MP4 when a module will be watched outside the platform, and TXT for the written transcript page that every good course should have. Caption once per module; export per destination.
A review pass that fits a course-length video
Technical vocabulary is where machine transcription needs you: product names, domain terms, acronyms. The studio flags low-confidence words, so instead of re-reading an hour of transcript you jump between flagged words and fix in place. Twenty minutes of review on a 60-minute module is the usual cost, and it is the difference between captions you ship and captions you apologize for.
Limits, honestly
The free plan captions videos up to 2 minutes, 2 minutes of audio per day, resetting at 00:00 UTC, fine for micro-lessons and module trailers. Long-form modules need the 30-minute per-video cap that comes with the paid plans. The practical move for a webinar is captioning the Q&A highlights and the trailer, where the audience concentrates. Try the studio on one module segment to judge transcript quality on your own audio, no account needed.