Captioning Tips

Top 3 Programs for Working with Captions

2023-05-31T20:18:00.002-07:00

This is a special guest post, written by Ben Jacklin. Ben is an experienced writer and technology enthusiast with a passion for the digital world. He holds media and music technology qualifications and has become a respected name in the software and tutorial review industry.

These days, captions are becoming increasingly important for modern media content. Captions help to make video content more accessible by providing subtitles and helping to make media understandable for people with hearing disabilities. As working with captions can be a tricky process, the right programs are essential for creating and managing captions effectively. In this article, we'll explore the top 3 programs for working with captions. We'll look at their features, how they can help you work with captions more efficiently, and which program is right for you.

Whether you're creating video content for a client or simply managing your own media library, having a go-to program for caption work can be extremely valuable. All the programs explored in this article are designed to help you take control of your captions and make sure that you are making the most of them. So let's dive into our top 3 and take a look at their features, capabilities, and which ones are the right choice for you.

MovieCaptioner

MovieCaptioner is one of the most powerful and comprehensive captioning programs available, making it an excellent choice for anyone looking for a comprehensive caption solution. MovieCaptioner features a built-in text editor that makes creating captions intuitive and easy, even for users with limited technical experience. This makes it ideal for producing short-form or quick captions for short videos. The subtitle editor works by playing the first 4-second (adjustable) loop of the movie, and you type what you hear in that 4-second loop. Once you've typed what you've heard, just hit the Return/Enter key and the caption and starting timecode will be recorded, and the next 4-second loop will begin automatically. This really speeds the transcription process. MovieCaptioner also allows you to import text and then sync it to the movie simply by using the Set Timecode feature and hitting the Return/Enter key as each caption is spoken.

MovieCaptioner also allows you to create captions in various formats and extensively customize your output. You can choose between a variety of formats, such as SRT, VTT, DFXP, or SCC, to name a few. On the Mac version there is also the option to export as an Open-Captioned Movie, where the text is actually embedded into the video track and remains on all the time. The ability to choose the font, font size, and color is especially helpful for that option. Additionally, you can send your caption files to online streaming services like Netflix, or add your files to iTunes for iOS playback. MovieCaptioner is also extremely user-friendly, and provides helpful tutorials and support resources to help you get started quickly.

Overall, MovieCaptioner is an excellent choice for any project that requires accurate captioning, as it offers advanced customization options and a wide range of import and export options.

Movavi Video Editor

Movavi Video Editor is another excellent subtitle video editor for working with captions. Featuring an intuitive, easy-to-use design and a wide range of features, this program is perfect for both professionals and beginners. With Movavi Video Editor, you can easily edit, add, and remove captions from your videos, as well as adjust their font, size, color, and position.

Movavi Video Editor also has a great selection of video and audio effects to customize your captions. You can add a range of styles such as 3D, intense, or comic-book, as well as crop and zoom functions to adjust the caption position and size. Plus, you can upload your finished video to social media, YouTube, or other video streaming sites with just one click.

Movavi Video Editor makes it easy to create professional-looking captions for a wide range of video projects. Its powerful tools, customizable effects, and convenient sharing features make this program one of the best choices for those looking for a comprehensive captioning program.

Amara

Amara is a powerful yet easy-to-use captioning program for video content creators. As a free, open-source program, Amara is great for users who want to create captions without spending money on expensive tools. Amara features a slick, modern interface that makes it easy to create and customize captions.

You can easily create captions in any language, adjust timing and formatting, and add special effects such as italics or bold. Plus, Amara also allows you to export captions in a variety of formats and supports captions in any language. Additionally, you can collaborate with others on the project by inviting them to contribute, as well as access crowdsourced options such as translations.

All in all, Amara is a great choice for anyone looking for an affordable and convenient captioning tool. Its user-friendly interface and wide range of features make it an excellent choice for amateur and professional video content creators alike.

Wrap Up

In conclusion, finding the right program for you depends on the type of project you're working on. All the programs we've reviewed – MovieCaptioner, Movavi Video Editor and Amara – offer a range of features and capabilities that make them suited perfectly for different captioning purposes. Whether you're looking for an intuitive, professional-grade program with lots of customization, a free and open-source program with crowdsourced translations, or something in between, these programs can help you create captions that truly add value to your content.

Creating Open Captions - An Update

2017-02-03T20:45:00.002-08:00

Previously I wrote about how to make what are known as "open captions", that is, captions that are always on and cannot be turned off like closed captions. The process I mentioned was that you would export from MovieCaptioner as an Embedded QuickTime movie, then open that movie in QuickTime Pro and export as a new movie. What this would do is combine the separate text track with the video track so it can't be ignored. If the text track is separate, when you upload it to YouTube or some other site, the text track would be ignored and you'd just get the movie and no captions.

Unfortunately, although it still works if you currently own QuickTime Pro, Apple has decided in their infinite wisdom to stop selling QuickTime Pro for whatever reason. Since then I've been searching for a replacement and I think I've finally found something. The software is called iSkysoft iMedia Converter Deluxe. It can take the SRT caption files that you export from MovieCaptioner and add them to a movie. When you export the new movie, it combines the text with the video track just like QuickTime Pro did.

The problem I saw initially was that the text was white with a gray outline and often hard to read depending on your video. I discovered, however, that you can change the text font, color, and size, and even change its placement over the movie. Note that the placement will be the same throughout the movie. It can't be at the top on one scene and at the bottom in another.

After you launch iSkysoft iMedia Converter Deluxe, just drag your movie to the interface. Then click on the little crop icon under the movie icon. We're not cropping the movie, but just gaining access to some editing tabs.

A new window will open and at the top of that window you'll see editing tabs for Crop, Effect, Watermark, Subtitle, and Audio. Choose the Watermark tab.

Choose the Image Type radio button then find your background graphic. Here I've just made a black bar in Photoshop and saved it as a JPEG. Here it is if you want to right-click and download it...

The transparency for the black bar can be adjusted, but I've left it at 50%. Notice after you choose your graphic, it will appear in the upper left of the Output Preview window. Drag the right side of the graphic so it fills the width of the movie and drag it to the bottom...

Now we'll add the SRT subtitle file by clicking on the Subtitle tab at the top of the window. There you can choose your SRT file from the Subtitle pulldown menu, your font, color, and font size. You can also tell it where you want to place the text, although I've not had much luck with changing this. You might have to leave it at the bottom and adjust if necessary once you see what the final movie looks like. You should also scroll through your movie to be sure the text is all going to fit into your black bar, too. If I had a three line caption, I might have to increase the height of my bar by going back to the Watermark tab and resizing it.

When you're done, just click the Save button. If you want to change from the default movie settings, click on the Target settings for the movie. I left it on the default MOV setting, which uses H.264 video compression and AAC audio compression. This will work for both QuickTime Player and Windows Media Player.

Just click on either the Convert button next to the Target settings or the Convert All button at the bottom of the window to create your captioned movie. Once it's done it will be in your Mac's Movies folder and inside a new folder called iSkysoft iMedia Converter Deluxe. On Windows it will be in your AppData\Roaming\iSkysoft\Media Converter Deluxe folder.

I hope this little tutorial helps you. Drop me a line if you have tried this yourself or have another solution to creating open captions. You can download a free demo of iSkysoft Video Converter from https://www.iskysoft.com. The demo will allow you to export 1/3 of your movie. Cost is currently $39.95 annually or $58.95 lifetime.

Also, give MovieCaptioner a try too. You'll find it's the easiest way to create SRT and other caption formats as well as transcripts of your movies. The transcription process is streamlined and only takes a few minutes to learn. You can download your free 14-day, fully functional demo from http://www.synchrimedia.com/downloads.html and while your there you can download a free eBook called Get Started with Video Captioning that will be helpful in learning the basics of making your videos accessible to the deaf. It is available in both iBooks and PDF formats. There is also a Spanish translation available in PDF format.

And if you have any questions, drop me a line at synchrimedia@gmail.com. I'd be glad to help you if I can.

If you'd like to buy Video Converter, you can use this direct link: https://shopper.mycommerce.com/checkout/cart/add/16339-10?affiliate_id=622274
I liked it so much I became an affiliate!

The direct link to buy MovieCaptioner is here: http://www.synchrimedia.com/buy_moviecaptioner.html

Adding Closed Captions to Facebook Movies

2016-03-30T20:40:00.001-07:00

Did you know that Facebook supports closed captioning? Here's how to do it.

First, you will need to create your captions using MovieCaptioner or some other software. Export as SRT, the same caption format that YouTube uses.

Once you have your caption file ready, upload your movie to Facebook by clicking the Add Photos/Video link on your status.

Click the blue Post button. Your video will begin to upload. After your video is done uploading, you should get a "Processing" alert that will give you the option to Edit your movie.

Click the Edit Video button. It will take you to this page where you can set the description, privacy, date, and other information associated with your video.

If you didn't see the Processing alert, you can always click the Options menu on your video's page and select Edit this video from there.

Scroll down to where it says Captions on the Edit page. Note the naming convention you'll need to use for your SRT file. Mine says to use "filename.en_US.srt", so I had to add ".en_US" before the ".srt" on my file prior to uploading it. If you don't use that naming convention, you may get an error when you save it. That happened to me before I noticed that I needed to change the name.

Click the button to upload your SRT file, then click the Save button at the bottom of the page and you're done! Now if the captions are not appearing when you play the movie, just click the little cog wheel icon on the video's playbar and check the Captions option.

If you need an easy way to create SRT files for Facebook videos, give MovieCaptioner a try. You can download the fully functional demo to use for 14 days from http://www.synchrimedia.com/downloads.html.

Extracting QT Text Tracks From Movies to Create Different Caption Formats

2016-02-18T18:18:00.002-08:00

Do you have a QuickTime movie that has a text track, but you need to somehow get the captions out to create another format, such as SRT for YouTube or SCC for broadcast TV or iOS devices? Today's your lucky day. I'll show you how easy it is to repurpose QT Text tracks from movies.

First of all, you'll need QuickTime Pro, which is a $30 upgrade to the QuickTime 7 Player from Apple.

Open your movie that has the text tracks in it and go to the Window menu and select Show Movie Properties.

In the Movie Properties window, select your text track (this one has 2 - one is French and one is English) and then click the Extract button.

It will extract the text track into a new movie. Kind of weird to have a movie that is nothing but text, but that's okay.

Now we're going to export this movie from QuickTime Pro.

Choose Text to Text from the pulldown menu. I've named the new file "french.txt".

Once it exports, you'll have a QT Text file that looks something like this.

Now, before we import this file into MovieCaptioner, we're going to first save it as Unicode (UTF-8) encoding. This will fix any unsupported characters like characters with accents (a lot of them in my French file), smart quotes, curly apostrophes, ellipses, em-dashes, en-dashes, and probably a few others I'm forgetting about. This is particularly important if you intend to create SCC captions. They can sure throw a monkey wrench into the works!

Now open up a new project in MovieCaptioner, load your movie and save your project, then go to the Import menu and select QT Text as the import option.

It will pull in all the captions and the associated timecode that goes along with each one. Be sure to set your Frames Per Second (FPS) in MovieCaptioner. It's right between the movie and the caption list. Clicking on that will open the Preferences window where you can select your frame rate.

(click the image for a larger view)

Once you have everything set you can choose from one of the many exports from MovieCaptioner including for YouTube, SCC (for broadcast, DVDs, and iOS devices), and many Web players.

Please give MovieCaptioner a try. You can download a free, fully-functional demo that is good for 14 days from http://www.synchrimedia.com. Please view the tutorial videos there to see how easy it is to be up and running with MovieCaptioner in a few minutes.

Good luck with your captioning projects!

How to Add Captions to YouTube Videos

2016-02-01T07:22:00.000-08:00

It's really simple to add captions to your YouTube videos. If you're using MovieCaptioner, just use the YouTube export option...

This will create a text file with a ".srt" file extension, which you would upload to YouTube after you've uploaded your movie. Just click the CC button under your movie...

Then choose Add new subtitles or CC...

Select Upload a file...

Choose Subtitles file and find your SRT file that you exported from MovieCaptioner, then click Upload.

After the SRT file uploads, you'll see the captions on the right-hand side of the screen. Just scroll to the bottom and click the Publish button and you're done. Pretty simple.

It will tell you your captions were published...

Now all you need to do is click the CC button on the playbar of your movie and enable your captions.

Good luck with your captioning projects!

Closed Captioning - The Secret Edge to Marketing Your Video Content

2015-05-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

As you may know, video can be a compelling way to advertise your product or get your message across to millions of people every day. But what you may not know is that by captioning your videos, all the content in your video becomes searchable, and that will give you a huge edge over your competition that may not have captioned their videos. Closed captioning software has come a long way and it's now easier than ever to add captions to your videos. YouTube, Vimeo, and many others only require you to upload a single closed caption file to make your videos accessible to the deaf population. This will open up your market to a whole new audience. According to the World Federation of the Deaf, there are approximately 70 million deaf people in the world, certainly not a market to overlook. Not only does closed captioning make your content available to those who can't hear, but studies have shown that many hearing people learn better when closed captions are present in the video. It can help them to see the words that they are hearing, see the spellings of names, vocabulary words, and clear up confusion when the audio is not quite clear. It also allows them to know what is being said when they are in a noisy environment or even in a quiet environment when they cannot use headphones. It is also the law in many places that video content must be made accessible to students with hearing disabilities. So, if you want to increase your SEO, open your market up to a whole new segment of the population, and provide better retention of your video content, it time to start captioning your videos! Will you take advantage of the secret edge to marketing video content? Or will your competition have that advantage over you?

Good luck with your captioning projects!

Synchronizing Transcripts to Your Video the Easy Way

2015-01-08T08:15:00.002-08:00

Let's say you already have a text transcript of your movie and you need to synchronize it. First you'll need to break them up into readable chunks if they aren't already. You'll put carriage returns in the break them into separate captions on each line. Something like 50-60 characters or so looks good usually. You can use your text editor's built-in character counters to get you in the ballpark.

Once you have your transcript broken up line by line into captions, you're ready to synchronize it. Make sure it is a plain text file and it has a ".txt" file extension.

Open MovieCaptioner and load your movie. You'll be asked to save your project right away after importing your movie.

Then go to the Import menu and select Text in Line Form.

This will tell MovieCaptioner to treat each separate line as a different caption. Once the transcript is imported, you'll see the Set Timecode button appear at the top of the interface (or access it via the View menu). If you haven't used this feature yet, see this video:

Using MovieCaptioner to Synchronize Imported Transcripts

It may take you a little practice, but it will get the timing dead on.

This works great, but what if you have a very long movie? Is there a shortcut? Indeed there is! First, you may need to increase your limit with YouTube. You can do this by verifying your email. You will also need to own the movie you are uploading (according to YouTube). The maximum you can upload to YouTube will be 128GB or 11 hours long. Hopefully your movie isn't THAT long!

Then use YouTube's Upload button to upload your video. You can set the viewing privileges to Private if you don't want anyone to see it on YouTube.

After uploading your movie, go to the Video Manager and find your movie's Edit pulldown menu. Select Subtitles and CC from the pulldown menu.

Click the Add New Subtitles or CC button on the next page.

Choose your language. From here you'll have 3 choices: Upload a file, Transcribe and set timings, and Create new subtitles or CC.

Choose Upload a file, then select Transcript (since you don't have timecode yet). Use the Choose File button to find the transcript on your computer. Then click the blue Upload button.

You'll see your transcript appear in the window. Now simply click the Set timings button and go to lunch.

The auto timing will of course depend on the length of your video, but it doesn't take too long usually. You should eventually see your captions with timecode to the left of each one. Now there's one more step - click the Publish button to make them available to the movie. This will make the CC button appear on the playbar of the movie.

If YouTube was your final destination, congratulations - you're done! But what if you need to create a file for some other use such as a DVD or broadcast captions? It's simple. Just go back to the Subtitles and CC window where you uploaded them and click on the language that you selected before you uploaded the transcript.

You'll see the captions listed again, but just above it on the right you'll see a button called Actions. That is a pulldown menu where you'll select the type of file to download. Choose .srt. It will save the captions as a file to your computer with the timecode.

Then you can open a new MovieCaptioner project, load your movie, then go to the Import menu and select Subrip SRT. Find the SRT file you downloaded from Youtube and it will just suck the captions and timecode right in. Then you can export it as whatever caption format you want!

Hope this saves you some time if you already have transcripts. If you don't, MovieCaptioner can help you create them and when you're done creating them you won't need YouTube to synchronize them. The timecode will be there ready for you to export to many different caption formats. Give MovieCaptioner a test spin today. The demo version is fully functional for 14 days and I'd be glad to help you with any questions you might have.

Using Compressor to add SCC Captions to Video for Broadcast TV

2014-07-23T06:31:00.001-07:00

Updated 5-20-18...

An inexpensive way to add SCC captions to your video for broadcast TV is to use Apple's Compressor ($49.95 from the App Store). After creating your captions in MovieCaptioner, export your project as Sonic Scenarist (SCC File Only). This is the file you'll use along with your movie in Compressor.

Open Compressor, then go to to the File menu and select Add File and load your movie into the interface. Then in the Settings panel, select the proper preset that your station expects you to use. Most likely it will be something like MPEG-2 Program Stream, which you'll find under the MPEG Files dropdown menu. Just drag that preset onto the movie panel where it says Add Outputs and it should stick there.

With the most recent version of Compressor (4.4), you will next see where it says Captions right under your movie and to the right of that is a Set link. Click on that and find your SCC caption file on your computer. It will have a .scc file extension. Once you load it, you should see all your caption on the lower right corner of the Compressor interface where you can make changes if necessary prior to exporting...

If you just try to export now, you'll probably get an error saying something to the effect that no language was set. Click on the Caption layer under your movie (where the Set link is) and the right-hand properties pane should change to be the Captions pane. There you'll set the language of your captions.

Once that is done the Start Batch button should be highlighted in blue. Just click that and it will render the captions to your video. Pretty easy, right? Here are the 5 steps. Click for a larger view...

Once the processing is complete, you can check to see if your captions are there by opening the new movie in VLC Player (a free video player from VideoLAN. After opening it in VLC Player, go to the Video window and select Subtitles > Closed captions 1. You may need to rewind your movie and replay it to see the captions appear.

While the captions in VLC Player will look a bit different from what you'll see on TV, that's just the way VLC displays them. They will look the way they're supposed to look when aired.

Troubleshooting

If you've followed these instructions and you don't see the captions appearing in VLC (subtitles may be grayed out), it could be that your movie contains a Timecode Track or some other tracks in addition to the Video Track and Sound Track. These may prevent Compressor from adding the SCC captions. If you have QuickTime Pro ($30 upgrade to QuickTime 7, but no longer being sold by Apple), the solution is easy. Open your movie in QuickTime Pro and go to the Movie Properties window. Select the Timecode Track (and any other tracks except the Video and Sound Tracks) and click the Delete button to remove them. Then save your movie.

If you do not have QuickTime Pro, what you may want to try is re-exporting your movie using the free app MPEG Streamclip. Exporting a new QT movie should eliminate the extra tracks so you can add the SCC captions in Compressor.

Another gotcha could be that your SCC file's timecode start time does not match that of your movie. If the movie's start time is say 01:00:00;00, then the SCC file should also start at 1 hour. If it starts at 00:00:00;00, so should your SCC file. This is easy to check in Compressor by looking at the Timing info just below the movie's info near the top of the attributes column...

In MovieCaptioner you can switch to 01 HR Start Time under the Edit menu just prior to exporting as SCC, when you're done previewing and are ready to create your SCC file.

A couple of notes...

SCC files create what are called CEA-608 captions on Line 21 of the video (often called Line 21 captions). Many networks have the capability to up-convert CEA-608 captions to the newer CEA-708 standard. Although this conversion works, it does not allow the viewer at home to change any of the text properties associate with the captions like true CEA-708 captions. To create CEA-708 captions you would need an MCC caption file. MovieCaptioner cannot currently create these, but our affiliate, East Texas Captioning can. For a nominal fee they can add the MCC file to your video for broadcast.

I don't know that a similar inexpensive solution for Windows users exists. It might actually pay you to get a Mac that can run Compressor just for this purpose.

Another option would be to purchase the HDProQT plugin for QuickTime Player from PixelTools. Cost is $1495, but it will allow you to choose your SCC or MCC file and export the broadcast video directly from any QuickTime supporting software, such as QuickTime Pro, Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premiere.

How to Extract a QT Text Track from a Video and Import It into MovieCaptioner

2013-11-16T07:54:00.001-08:00

A reader had a movie with a QuickTime Text track and wanted to be able to use those captions for other caption formats. To do this you will need QuickTime Pro, a $30 upgrade to the QuickTime 7 Player from Apple. Start by opening your captioned movie in QuickTime Pro, then go to the Movie Properties window (under the Window menu). Select the Text Track, then click the Extract button... This will open the Text Track as a new movie. Now go to the File menu and select Export. Use the pulldown menu to select Text to Text, give the file a name and click Save... This will create a QT Text file which you can import into MovieCaptioner. Now open MovieCaptioner, load your movie and save your project. Then go to the Import menu and select "QT Text". Once the text and timecode are loaded you can export as any format you see under the Export menu.

You can download a free 14-day, fully functional demo of MovieCaptioner and try it for yourself and see why so many are turning to this software for their captioning needs.

How to Import CAP Caption Files into MovieCaptioner

2013-11-16T07:16:00.002-08:00

A reader recently asked if there was a way to import CAP files into MovieCaptioner. MovieCaptioner currently does not import CAP files directly, but there is a way, thanks to YouTube. As you may know, YouTube can import and display captions. What you may not know is that CAP files (with the .cap file extension) are one of the formats YouTube can accept. YouTube can also accept SRT (what MovieCaptioner uses for the YouTube caption export), SUB, SBV, and MPsub files. So, all you need to do is upload a movie to YouTube or use a movie you already have up there. It does not matter if it's the same movie that the CAP file goes to or how long the movie is. After you have a movie on YouTube, go to YouTube's Video Manager, check the box next to the video you want to edit, and use the pulldown menu next to your video to select Captions. This will take you to a new screen where you will choose your caption file to upload. Just click the Add New Track button and find your CAP file on your computer. After you upload the CAP file, click the new box that appears (English in the example below)... You will see your captions listed along with the timecode that goes with them. Now click the Actions button... and select .SRT from the menu under the Download section. This will download a converted SRT file to your computer. Now you can import this SRT file into MovieCaptioner by going to MovieCaptioner's Import menu and selecting Subrip SRT. You can download a free 14-day, fully functional demo of MovieCaptioner and try it for yourself and see why so many are turning to this software for their captioning needs.

Adding Captions to Windows Media Movies Using Microsoft Expresssion Encoder 4

2013-02-24T20:32:00.001-08:00

There are three different ways of adding captions to Windows Media movies: SAMI captions, Windows Media Encoder 9 (using WMP Text captions), and Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 (using SRT captions).

Today we'll add them using Microsoft Expression Encoder 4. One of the problems with using SAMI captions for Windows Media is that the caption file must always be linked to the movie, since it's separate from the movie. A better way is to actually embed the captions into the movie so they travel with it and are always available as long as the user has closed captioning turned on in their Windows
Media Player.

We're going to start by creating our captions in MovieCaptioner as we normally would. Make sure you create an MPEG-4 or .MOV version of your WMV file for use in MovieCaptioner as it's QuickTime-based. You'll still use your WMV movie for the final version, however. Instead of breaking up the captions using a forced line break as you might usually do, we're not going to add any line breaks at all. In fact if your project already has line breaks, you're going to need to remove them. This is easily done by going to the Edit menu in MovieCaptioner and selecting Delete All Line Breaks "|" In Caption List.

The reason for this is because Expression Encoder will only read one line per caption. If you have 2 or more lines, it will only display the last line for each caption. Once you have all the captions set, just export as Subrip SRT.

Now that you have your SRT file, open Microsoft Expression Encoder 4. Select New Transcoding Project from the startup screen.

Once it opens, go to the File menu and import your WMV movie. After the movie loads go to the Metadata tab on the right, then scroll down if necessary and click the little cog wheel at the bottom of the Script Commands section of the Metadata tab. That will allow you to import your SRT file to the project.

Once the SRT file is imported, you should see all your captions listed in the Script Commands section. You can actually edit them here if necessary. Now you're ready to encode.

First, click on the Output tab (next to Metadata usually). Here you can set the file name and the target directory. After that's set go to the Encode tab and set it to whatever you need. I'm leaving the default in this instance.

Then go to the File menu and select Encode.

After it's done encoding you can open the encoded movie in Windows Media Player and you should see your captions appear right on cue.

If you don't see your captions, right-click on your movie and select Lyrics, captions, and subtitles and then select On if available from its submenu.

If they still don't display, there is a security setting you need to check. Right-click on your movie again and go to More options.... Click the Security tab and select the radio button next to Show local captions when present.

That should do it. Creating embedded captions for Windows Media movies is a snap with Microsoft Expression Encoder 4. And creating the caption file is also very easy if you use MovieCaptioner to do it. You can download a free 14-day, fully functional demo of MovieCaptioner and try it for yourself and see why so many are turning to this software for their captioning needs.

Creating Closed Captioned Movies for iBooks

2013-02-14T06:46:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about iBooks is that you can make your movies accessible by providing closed captions. It's very easy to do, too, if you own a Mac and have the right tools. For this tutorial we'll be using the following software:

MovieCaptioner
MPEG Streamclip
QuickTime Pro
ClosedCaptionImporter plugin for QuickTime
iBooks Author

A Little Setup

iBooks support a caption format known as Sonic Scenarist (SCC). This format is also known in broadcasting circles as Line 21 captions. To be able to import these captions into our movie, we'll need QuickTime Pro ($30 upgrade to the QuickTime 7 Player from Apple) and the ClosedCaptionImporter plugin for QuickTime from Apple as well.

QuickTime 7 is required even though your Mac already ships with QuickTime X, but QuickTime X will not allow you to add captions to your movie, so either download QuickTime 7 from the Apple site or install it from your Mac OS X install disk as a custom install. It will install it in your Applications/Utilities folder and can coexist perfectly with QuickTime X as a separate application.

Once you get QuickTime 7 installed, upgrade it to QuickTime Pro by purchasing a serial number from the Apple website to unlock the editing features of QuickTime 7.

You will also need to download the ClosedCaptionImporter plugin for QuickTime from Apple. It's a bit hard to find on their Web site, so drop me an email if you can't find it and I'll send you a link. Once you get the plugin, just drop it in your Library/QuickTime folder. If you can't find your hidden Library folder, just to to the Finder's Go menu and select Go to Folder. Type "~/Library/QuickTime" into the form and hit Go and it should open the right folder for you. Drop the file "ClosedCaptionImporter.component" in this folder and restart QuickTime 7 to make the plugin available to the software.

Fomatting the Movie

We want to start by opening our movie and converting it to an MPEG-4 (MP4) movie. This is necessary for the captions to display properly in the final movie. Using a plain ".mov" file may display your captions initially, but if you quit out of QuickTime Player and open it again, they will not display even though the caption track is still present. So you MUST use an MP4 movie. We'll use MPEG Streamclip for this. MPEG Streamclip is a free video converter available from Squared5 (http://www.squared5.com). After you open your movie in MPEG Streamclip, go to the File menu and select Export to MPEG-4...

This will bring up a settings window where you can adjust the final movie's properties. I've set it to the best quality and kept the same size for this movie...

Then click the Make MP4 button in the lower right and give your movie a different name, being sure to keep the ".mp4" extension. Your movie will export.

Creating the Captions with MovieCaptioner

Now that we have our MP4 movie, open a new project in MovieCaptioner. Click the Load Movie button and find your new MP4 movie on your hard drive. Make sure it's on your main hard drive and not a mounted drive for best results.

After your movie is loaded, click the Start button (NOT the movie's play button). It will begin to play the first 4 seconds of your movie (or whatever number you have set in the Repeat Interval setting).

Once you've typed everything you heard in that loop of the movie, hit your Return key and it will record the start time and the caption on the right. Continue typing what you hear, as MovieCaptioner will move on to the next 4 second loop of your movie. Just keep typing and hitting the Return key to record each caption. It will stop when you've done the last caption automatically.

There is no need to save along the way. Each time you set a caption the project gets saved automatically.

If you need to stop at any time and perhaps edit a caption, click the Stop/Start button to stop the loop and edit your captions directly in the caption list on the right. Use the text area under the movie exclusively for creating new captions not for editing recorded captions. Once you make an edit, hit the Return key to save the edit and MovieCaptioner will save the edit automatically.

If you need to go back to setting new captions, first click the Cue Next button to insure that your next caption will start at the interval after your last saved caption.

When you're all done setting captions, go to the Export menu and choose "Sonic Scenarist (SCC Embed in QT)." MovieCaptioner will then analyze each caption and automatically break each up into no more than 32 characters per line and no more than 4 lines per caption. This is due to the strict specifications of the SCC format. Once it's done adding line breaks it will convert the captions into hexidecimal numbers and ask you to save the SCC file. Once you give it a name and save it, it will automatically launch QuickTime 7 Pro and add your captions to your movie.

Review your movie with the captions. If you need to change anything, just close the QuickTime Player window without saving. Return to MovieCaptioner and make your final edits before exporting again. Once the captions on in the movie in the QuickTime player to your satisfaction, just save the movie. Saving the movie will actually bring up the Save As window where you'll give the movie and new name and it will make you keep the ".mov" extension in order to save it. This is perfectly fine for use in the iBook and will still open correctly in QuickTime Player as long as the movie was first saved as MPEG-4. You can change it back to ".mp4" when it's done saving.

On to iBooks Author

Now that you have a captioned movie, open iBooks Author. Decide on which page you want to put the movie and just drag your captioned MP4 movie to that page. It will create a movie widget for you automatically. Resize and place the widget where you want it.

See it on your iPad

To see what it's going to look like, attach an iPad to your computer via USB cable and go to iBooks on your iPad. In iBooks Author click on the Preview icon bar at the top of the interface.

It will create a preview right on your iPad and will launch the book automatically to that page. If you have Closed Captioning turned on on your iPad you should be able to see your captions.

If you need to turn on closed captioning, go to the Settings, scroll down on the left until you find Videos, select it and Closed Captioning should appear on the right. Then just slide the switch on and closed captioning will be enabled.

Good luck with your captioning projects!

Creating Video Captions with Asian and Other Accented Characters

2013-01-18T12:16:00.000-08:00

A common problem with creating captions for video is when you run into non-Enlish characters. Asian characters and European accented characters can present special problems for captioning. People will often create QT Text files with these characters...

...and find out they look like gibberish when they view them embedded into their movies.

What's the answer?

MovieCaptioner tackles this problem by using TeXML files instead of QT Text files to embed captions into a movie. The XML file it creates will support many characters. You can import a Chinese transcript into MovieCaptioner, for example, but you must prepare the file first.

Let's say you have a Chinese transcript in Microsoft Word...

(Thanks to William Roth, Broadcast Operations Engineer at the Cleveland Clinic for providing this sample transcript.)

Don't try to directly import a MS Word document or and RTF file. First, save it as a new "Plain Text" file.

After selecting Plain Text and giving it a new name, click the Save button. An alert screen will come up telling you the formatting of your document will be lost. On this alert page, click the Other Encoding radio button, then choose Unicode 6.1 UTF-8 from the menu to its right. It will give you a preview at the bottom of the window. Click OK to save the file. The UTF-8 encoding is extremely important as it will remap the characters to ones supported by that encoder.

Open it in a text editor like Text Wrangler or BBedit on the Mac or Notepad++ on Windows and break the lines up into separate captions by line like so...

Save it and close it.

Note: If you are on Windows, you might want to open the text file you just created and copy all the text, create a new text file, and paste all the text in the new file. Save this file again as plain text with UTF-8 Encoding. The reason for this is that sometimes Windows doesn't do such a red hot job of removing the unsupported character formatting. Going this one extra step seems to cure it. Having these unsupported characters in your project can cause lots of problems, especially if you are exporting to the SCC format.

Now open a new project in MovieCaptioner and load your movie. Then go to the Import menu and select Text in Line Form.

This means text that has been broken up line by line into captions as we've just done.

The text will flow right into the interface with all characters intact.

Since there was no timecode associated with this transcript, 00:00:00.00 is set as a default for each caption. All we need to do is synch the captions with the movie. We do this using the Set Timecode at the top that appears automatically when you import text (also available under the View menu).

To synch the captions, click the Set Timecode button and it will automatically set the first caption's timecode at 00:00:00.00. If you don't want the first one to start there, add a blank caption to the beginning by selecting the first caption and clicking the Insert Caption button. The movie will begin playing once you hit the Set Timecode button and you'll notice the second caption is highlighted in blue. When the first word of this caption is spoken, quickly hit your Return key to record the timecode for that caption. It will insert the timecode and then highlight the next one and you'll listen for that next. Continue this process until you've gotten through the whole video. It will stop automatically at the end.

You now have timecode associated with each caption...

Now you can Preview your handiwork by clicking the Preview button.

If everything is okay, click the Save As button to save it as a new movie with captions. If not, just close the Preview window and go back to editing.

Give MovieCaptioner a try. You can download a free, fully-functional demo that is good for 14 days from http://www.synchrimedia.com. Please view the tutorial videos there to see how easy it is to be up and running with MovieCaptioner in a few minutes.

Good luck with your captioning projects!

Problems with AVC Coding and Captioning

2012-12-16T08:31:00.001-08:00

A not-so-new video encoding algorithm has a not-so-good affect on video captioning. It has caused a lot of tech questions from MovieCaptioner users who are trying to embed captions into movies. AVC Coding (Advanced Video Coding) is a commonly used video format for high definition video, and has been around since about 2003. Unfortunately this advanced format cannot be used to embed captions. What users will find is that they might (or might not) see their captions in their video, but when they go to save it they will get an error and/or the video will not save at all. Since MovieCaptioner uses QuickTime's method of adding text tracks to movies, I manually tried to add a caption track (without using MovieCaptioner) and got the same results. It simply would fail when it came to saving the movie with captions. If you're having such problems saving your captions in your movie, open it in QuickTime Pro and check the Movie Inspector window. This is one of the reasons I strongly suggest that MovieCaptioner users upgrade QuickTime 7 to the Pro version ($30 from Apple). It will look something like this if AVC Coding was used...

If you see AVC Coding or JVT/AVC Coding, you can probably forget about adding captions to this video. In fact, if your video uses JVT/AVC Coding it may even crash MovieCaptioner and not play in QuickTime Player. You will need to re-export your video using a different codec. If you try to use QuickTime Pro to export, however, you will find that it will not export properly. Most of the time you'll get the audio, but with a blank white video track. Not what you want. I have found, however, that the solution is to use MPEG Streamclip to re-export your movie as an MPEG-4 movie.

MPEG Streamclip is free and is available for both Mac and Windows platforms. You can download it from the Squared5 website. Just drag your movie onto the MPEG Streamclip interface, go to the File menu and choose Export to MPEG-4. Then choose H.264 as the video compression and set the quality to 100%. It does a nice job of converting the video while maintaining quality.

If that doesn't work, another trick is to upload your movie to YouTube, then use the Download MP4 option in Youtube's Video Manager to download a reformatted version of your movie. As long as your movie isn't too long for YouTube's time limit, this is usually a good way to do it.

Once you have your video converted, it's time to use it in MovieCaptioner. We're going to replace the movie you tried to use before with the new one you just exported from MPEG Streamclip. Open your MovieCaptioner project and go to the File menu and choose Load Movie, then locate your new movie on your hard drive. Always work off your main hard drive and not a mounted drive with MovieCaptioner and you'll have few problems. Once you load the movie, you'll be asked to save your project again. Either save over the old project or give it a new name. Once you've done that you should be able to export with embedded captions and it should save correctly.

UPDATE: If you're using Premiere to export your videos, I've found that using H.264 as the video Format will save the movie with AVC Coding. However, if you select QuickTime as the Format and set the Video Codec to H.264, you can get a movie that works with MovieCaptioner right out of the gate.

If you'd like to try MovieCaptioner to caption your movies, you can download a fully functional 14 day demo version here: http://www.synchrimedia.com. There are also some video tutorials on the Tutorials link on that page to get you up and running quickly. It requires no specialized knowledge. In fact, if you can type, you're already an expert at using MovieCaptioner. It can also work with Nuance's Dragon speech-to-text software if you'd rather talk than type. Good luck with your video captioning. I hope this helps.

Closed Captioning for the iPad

2012-10-16T07:44:00.001-07:00

Closed captioning for the iPad is really very easy. First we will use MovieCaptioner to create our captions and then we will export them as a Sonic Scenarist (SCC) caption file. These are the same type of captions you might see on TV and are often called Line 21 captions. We will use Apple's Compressor software to create the captioned video for the iPad. First, after opening Compressor, if you see a Templates Chooser window, just hit the Cancel button. We won't need this. Drag your movie to the window with the downward facing arrow... Next, go to the Window menu and select Show Inspector if the Inspector window is not already open... Once the Inpector window is open, if it appears blank, click on your movie in the main window and the info for the movie should appear in the Inspector window... Now click the Additional Information tab in the Inspector window and choose your SCC file from your hard drive... You can close the Inspector window, then go to the Window menu and choose Settings... In the Settings window, click the triangle next to Apple Devices and select one of the four choices under it depending on your movie and target device... Drag your choice to the main window where your movie is. It should appear like this... Now just click the Submit button and give your project a name and click the Submit button for that window... It will begin to compress the movie... When it's done, it will create a movie that has the name of the setting you used tacked onto the name of your movie with a ".m4v" file extension...

Now all you need to do is drag your movie into iBooks Author and it will create a widget for the movie. You can test your movie on your iPad if you have it connected to your computer. Open iBooks on the iPad, then click the Preview button in the top panel of the iBooks Author interface... If you have closed captioning turned on in your iPad's Video settings, you should see the captions play along with the movie. Here is how to enable closed captioning on your iPad... So, creating captions for videos on the iPad is really a pretty simple process. MovieCaptioner makes it a lot easier by creating the SCC file that you need to import into Compressor. Give MovieCaptioner a try. You can download a free, fully-functional demo that is good for 14 days from http://www.synchrimedia.com. Please view the tutorial videos there to see how easy it is to be up and running with MovieCaptioner in a few minutes. Good luck with your captioning projects!

Captioning Recorded Adobe Connect Meetings

2012-10-11T08:30:00.002-07:00

If you need to caption Adobe Connect meetings that have already been recorded, there is an easy way. First, download these template files. The files contain an instructional PDF with screenshots showing you how to download your recorded meeting, how to caption it using MovieCaptioner, and how to make the captions work. The process is simply this:

Download your Adobe Connect recording and name it "main.flv" (case sensitive).
Load the movie into MovieCaptioner and create the captions.
Export the captions as Flash (DFXP) caption file naming it "captions.xml" (the default name from MovieCaptioner for Flash captions).
Copy the template folder and name it what you want.
Drop the "main.flv" and "captions.xml" files in the folder, replacing the 2 files with the same name in the template folder.
Launch the "index.html" file in the folder to check your work.
Upload the whole folder to your Web space and link to the "index.html" file

The big thing is to keep the naming convention of "main.flv" for the movie and "captions.xml" for the caption file as that is how it's hard-coded in the Flash file that plays the movie. The original Flash FLA file is also included in case you know Flash and want to change any aspects of the player.

Also note that this method does not use the files that are on the Adobe Connect server to deliver the video. You upload your template folder to your Web space and link to the "index.html" file inside this folder. The file sizes are not too bad to download for the user. For example, a 50 minute meeting recording is only 180MB in size for a 1920x1072 video that scales in size as you scale your browser window.

It is recommended that you use the Mac version of MovieCaptioner to do the captioning as it will eliminate the need to create a .MOV movie file from the .FLV file that you download from the Adobe Connect server. This is because there is a free plugin for QuickTime on the Mac called Perian http://www.perian.org that allows you to play FLV movies in the QuickTime Player. This plugin is not made for Windows. Perian will discontinue developing/supporting this plugin at some point as it says on their Web site, but you can still download it.

You can certainly use the Windows version, but you will need to convert the FLV to either a .MOV or MPEG-4 movie that can play in QuickTime prior to loading into MovieCaptioner for Windows. Sorry that I cannot recommend a particular video conversion app for this on Windows. Please beware of downloading software that may contain viruses or trojans on Windows. You would only need the MOV file for use with MovieCaptioner. You will still use the FLV file in the template folder.

If you've never tried MovieCaptioner, give it a whirl. You can download the demo which is fully functional for 14 days. There are also tutorial videos to get you up to speed with it in minutes here: MovieCaptioner Tutorial Videos.

Good luck with your captioning projects!

How to Tag Team a Video Captioning Project

2012-09-08T10:41:00.017-07:00

Do you have a deadline you have to meet for captioning a video? One way to get the job done in half the time is to do as the pro wrestlers do and tag team the project. With MovieCaptioner, this is pretty easy to do.

Let's break the project up between Person A and Person B. Person A will review the movie and find a spot about halfway through it where there is either no talking, or some type of break, like between sentences. Let's say about 30 minutes into the movie there is a spot where there is no talking and maybe some music starts playing. This might be an ideal spot. Maybe the music begins a 00:31:25.15. Person A tells Person B to start there. Person A just follows the normal work flow. She clicks the Load Movie button, sets the text attributes to what she wants and then hits the Start button to begin captioning the movie. She continues until she reaches the point agreed upon just prior to the music starting.

Person B will also open MovieCaptioner and instead of starting at the beginning, will drag the movie's playhead to just before 00:31:25.15 as close as he can get it, then hit the Play button on the movie control until it gets closer to the music point and then quickly click the Stop button on the movie controller. Now his movie is cued up to where he needs to start. He clicks the Start button and begins captioning from that point.

Once he has completed all the captions, Person B will go to the Export menu and choose Transcripts With Timecode. This will export a transcript of his project with the timecode next to each caption.

He'll open this in a text editor and delete the first line, which is just the title of the movie. He saves the file and emails it to Person A.

Person A opens her project again in MovieCaptioner and goes to the Import menu and selects Text in Line Form.
She locates the transcript file Person B has sent her and it imports all the captions and timecode from the transcript, adding it to the end of her project. Now she has a complete hour long captioning project that she can export in any of over 20 export formats that MovieCaptioner offers.

Please try MovieCaptioner to make your movies accessible. You can download a free, fully-functional 14 day demo.

Are QuickTime Text Tracks Dying?

2012-08-21T07:03:00.009-07:00

Lately I've been seeing increased problems with QuickTime text tracks that are either embedded in QT movies or are called in externally via a QT SMIL file, both of which MovieCaptioner can create.

First I saw problems on the Windows side. QuickTime 7.7.2 for Windows simply will not read any QT Text file embedded into the movie. It seemed to choke somewhere on a font attribute and would only display something like "al}" (when Arial was selected as the font). The same problems were exhibited with QT SMIL captions, where the .qt.smi file would call in the movie and the QT text file to display them together. I found that removing QT 7.7.2 and reinstalling QT 7.7.1 fixed this problem. I reported this as a bug to Apple in May 2012. If you need to revert to QT 7.7.1, send me an email at synchrimedia@gmail.com and I'll get it to you. It seems to have disappeared from Apple's downloads page.

Most recently I've found an issue on the Mac side of things as well. With my brand new MacBook Pro with retina display I get some pretty bizarre results with QT Text files as well. This is with QuickTime 7.6.6, the latest version of QT for the Mac. I did some experimenting and found that it was the retina display that seems to be causing the issues. When I hook my laptop up to an external monitor, the captions display perfectly. But, as I drag that movie from my non-retina display to the retina display on my laptop, the QT text track suddenly shrinks to half its size and moves halfway up the movie instead of being below the movie as it displays on the non-retina display. Here is the captioned movie as displayed with a non-retina display:

Here is the same movie after sliding it horizontally to my laptop's retina display:

As the movie moves to the retina display, the QT text track suddenly shrinks to half its size and moves halfway up the movie window. Typically, though, after embedding the text track into the movie, the movie will obscure the text track behind it. I also tried adjusting the QT text file to change the width and it will suddenly jump to a huge width if I go larger than what it is (320 as set here).

It's a shame Apple doesn't do a better job of supporting their own technology. I'm afraid this may cause many headaches for people who have gone to a lot of trouble to make their videos accessible only to find that when viewed on a retina display, all their work is for naught. Does that mean they are suddenly non-compliant with captioning laws? I hope not, but it will raise questions from people who do not know that this is a bug between QuickTime and retina displays, which I'm sure will become more prevalent in the future.

Fortunately, I've found that embedding an XML file instead of a QT text track still seems to work for some reason. I will most likely switch from using the SMIL captions with QT text files to using XML instead. The XML files will still work perfectly, both embedded and in the SMIL files on the retina display. If you're using MovieCaptioner, this will be the second export option under the Export menu called "Embedded QT (Unicode)". This format has the advantage of being able to display many characters that regular QT text files cannot display, including Asian character sets. The only problem with the XML format is that it will not wrap text as QT text files do by default, so you'll have to make sure to add the "|" symbol to denote a hard line break in MovieCaptioner so that it will know where to put the line breaks in the final XML file. MovieCaptioner now has an auto line break feature under the Edit menu that will allow you to add line breaks automatically every so many characters. You can set that amount to anything that suits your movie. It will look for a space between words on or before that character limit.

So, look for a change in the next version of MovieCaptioner unless Apple does a quick fix for this problem. I will most likely drop support for QT text files in favor of XML.

How to Create Open Captions for Your Movie

2012-02-06T05:43:00.000-08:00

First of all, let me explain the difference between closed captions and open captions. Closed captions can be toggled on and off, while open captions are on all the time. Simple and straightforward.

Update: Apple is no longer selling QuickTime Pro. If you already have QuickTime Pro, read on. If not, there is an alternative solution here: http://synchrimedia.blogspot.com/2017/02/creating-open-captions-update.html

Open captions are the better choice when the site where the movie is displayed does not support any type of captioning. An example of this is the popular Vimeo site. Since it does not support closed captioning, the captions must be made part of the video and not a separate track. If you attempt to upload a movie that has a video track, a sound track, and a text track, the text track will get stripped out on upload. What we need to do is to burn the text track into the video track.

In the video below, I've used MovieCaptioner to embed a text track into a movie. Note that in this case there is actually 2 text tracks. One is for the text and a separate track is for the translucent background, which gives it better contrast than just making the text track translucent. You see when you go to the Movie Properties window in QuickTime Pro that there is a Video Track, a Sound Track, Text Track 1 and Text Track 2. If I were to upload this, the 2 text tracks would be stripped out. (Click the image to see it larger.)

What I need to do at this point is to go to the File menu and Export to a new movie. Note that just doing a Save As will NOT do the trick. You must Export to combine the text track with the video track.

Use the Movie to QuickTime Movie option and then click the Options button to set the quality and size of your exported movie.

I would suggest using High or Best Quality settings with Multi-Pass encoding and not resizing the movie (use Current Size) in order to minimize any loss in quality of the movie's captions. Note that there will be some degradation in the quality since the text will no longer be vector-based like it is when it's a separate text track. If you're not worried about the file size of the movie, try using Photo-JPEG as the movie compression algorithm. It seems to produce crisp text, although the file size can be around 500 MB per minute for a movie that is 720x480. YMMV of course!

After exporting as a new movie and opening the new movie up in QuickTime Pro, I see that in the Movie Properties window I now have only a Sound Track and a Video Track, but I still have my captions and the translucent background that was added by MovieCaptioner. I can now upload this to my video site without fear of having the captions stripped out. (Click the image to see it larger.)

So you see it's pretty easy to create a movie with open captions. Hope this helps you make your videos more accessible!

How to Create Soft Subtitles in QuickTime

2011-11-18T07:18:00.000-08:00

A little-known way of displaying captions on QuickTime movies is soft subtitles. These are surprisingly easy to create and can be toggled on and off in the QuickTime Player under the View > Subtitles menu option. You will need to use MovieCaptioner and a freeware app called Subler.

To get the captions, you will need to create a .SRT caption file which looks like this:

It's simply a text file that contains the captions with start and end times. This can be created by hand, but it's much easier to create it with MovieCaptioner. Once you get all your captions done in MovieCaptioner, it's a simple matter of exporting as SubRip SRT. The YouTube Captions export can also be used to create the SRT file.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that if you have any blank captions in your project (to make the previous caption expire), you will need to add a space to the blank caption or Subler will put the timecode there instead. You can either do this in MovieCaptioner or add it to the SRT file using a text editor.

Once you have your SRT file saved, open Subler, and under the File menu, select New. Now just drag your movie into the Subler interface and select Add when prompted.

Then you'll add your SRT file the same way, by dragging it to the Subler interface and clicking Add.

Then just go to the File menu and select Save, and it will save it as an MPEG-4 ".m4v" file.

Open this in QuickTime Player and it will look like this:

A downside to soft subtitles is that they don't seem to work in the browsers. You can get around this by creating a poster movie that links to your movie, launching the QuickTime Player as a standalone app. First, download this Javascript code and save it to the same folder as your HTML page.

In the head tags of your HTML, put this code in:

<script src="AC_QuickTime.js" language="javascript"> </script>

Then in the body add this code to call your poster movie and make it link to your movie that will be launched in the QuickTime Player.

<script language="javascript">
QT_WriteOBJECT(
'poster.mov',
'320',
'240',
'',
'CONTROLLER',
'False',
'HREF',
'lunchroom_manners.m4v',
'TARGET',
'QuickTimePlayer'
);
</script>

To create a poster movie, all you need to do is to open your movie in the QuickTime Player, take a screenshot of it, then open that screenshot in the QuickTime Player again and save it as a movie (even though it's a picture) with a ".mov" extension. Pretty simple, no?

So give soft subtitles a try. Perhaps it can fit in with your movie delivery system.

Please try MovieCaptioner to make your movies accessible. You can download a free, fully-funcational 14 day demo.

Repositioning Closed Captions

2011-09-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

By default, MovieCaptioner puts your captions at the bottom of your movie. If using QT Text captions, your choice is either below the movie, where it doesn't interfere with the movie at all, or you can have them overlaid over the lower portion of the movie either with a black background or with a 50% translucent background. What do you do, however, if you have a movie that has some content at the bottom, such as a lower third (speaker's name and title for instance) or some other content that you don't want covered? Again, you have 2 choices. One would be to use Sonic Scenarist (SCC) captions. These are the same type you see on TV and are supported by Apple's iTunes. The other choice would be to stick with QT Text captions, but do a little manual manipulation. Let's look at each.

Sonic Scenarist (SCC) Captions

Using both SCC caption and QT Text captions, you will need QuickTime 7 Pro ($30 upgrade to QuickTime 7 Player from Apple). With the SCC captions, you can place the captions on one of 15 rows. Again, by default, MovieCaptioner puts these captions at the bottom of the movie in Row 15. If a caption is longer than one row, it will automatically bump the caption up a row for as many as it needs to fit the caption in. SCC captions can be up to 4 lines each and no more than 32 characters per line. So, if you have a caption that is 3 rows long, it will automatically bump the starting line up to Row 13. To set a caption to Row 1, for example, all you need to do is to change the SCC Row pulldown menu to the row you want them to start, then click the Change button next to it. You may start any caption on any row, unlike QTText captions which have to be the same throughout the movie.

Here is what the SCC caption will look like on Row 1 (and it wraps to Row 2 as well)...

A little gotcha to remember when exporting as Sonic Scenarist (Embedded SCC) captions from MovieCaptioner is that once the captions are added to the movie, you must remember to Save the QuickTime movie before closing the QuickTime Player window. For some reason, QuickTime will not warn you to save your movie with the SCC captions and they will be lost if you just close the QT Player window. You'll have to re-export from MovieCaptioner to get them back in. SCC captions also require the ClosedCaptionImporter.component plugin (free from Apple).

QuickTime Text Captions

QT Text captions have been a capability of QuickTime for a long time. They also require you to have QuickTime 7 Pro to add the captions to your movie. No special plugin is needed, however. The process of creating and adding QT Text captions to a movie can be very tedious if you do it manually, but luckily, MovieCaptioner makes this a snap. Just by choosing Embedded QuickTime from the Export menu in MovieCaptioner your project will create the QuickTime Text file and add it to your movie right before your eyes. An additional export option is Embedded QuickTime (Unicode), which writes an XML file instead of a QT Text file and embeds that into the movie. The advantage of the XML format gives you more support for special characters with accents, especially Asian characters. The down side is that they do not wrap naturally, so you'll need to add line breaks (type the bone "|" character) where you want the lines to break.

Here is what Embedded QuickTime captions would look like below the movie...

To move these captions to the top of the movie, you will need to go to the Movie Properties window in QuickTime Pro after adding your captions. Click the Text Track to select it, then click the Visual Settings tab in the middle of that window. Change the vertical offset to 0 and the captions will jump to the top...

Now, if you want the captions to truly be above the movie (not overlapping it as in the screenshot above), you will need to apply this last step to the movie's Video track as well. If you'll notice in the Movie Properties window above, the text track in this case is 40 pixels tall. This is how much we need to offset the movie's Video Track. So, select the Video Track, then in the Visual Setting tab we are again going to change the vertical offset. In this case it will be 40 to line up with the bottom of the Text Track.

Movie is now entirely below the captions. Notice how you can see more of the roof above the window gable as compared to the screenshot above...

You can also do this with the Translucent Background setting checked in the Text Properties area of MovieCaptioner. Instead of an opaque colored background, you'll get a 50% black background that overlaps the movie. This keeps the movie's aspect ratio the same and at the same time you can see the movie behind the text. The difference in using the translucent background would be that you have two Text Tracks to offset (set both to 0) instead of one as above. The translucent background is actually just a text track with no text and the background set to 50% transparent. The white text is overlaid on the translucent background so the text stays solid and is more readable than if it were transparent also. You would not move the Video Track in this case. Just leave the translucent background and text overlay the movie.

Notice how you can see the shingles of the house through the caption's background and the text is still very readable.

I hope this helps you understand a little about repositioning closed captions. It's not too hard and it will go a long way in some cases to keep your movies accessible while retaining the content below them.

Please try MovieCaptioner to make your movies accessible. You can download a free 14 day demo. Also, there is now a Windows version as well.

Starting a Video Captioning Business on the Cheap

2011-06-29T18:33:00.000-07:00

Do you like to watch movies? Can you type fairly quickly? Congratulations, you are now qualified as a video transcriptionist. And just in time, too, as there will be a gold rush soon for video transcription services.

In October 2010, President Obama signed into law the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which mandates further captioning of video for the Web. The bill will apply to any video that was originally aired on TV. As more and more videos are uploaded to the web, the demand for video captioning services will grow at an exponential rate. Government agencies, schools, museums, and many other types of businesses will need the services of a good video transcriptionist. Your biggest problem may be keeping up with the demand.

For about $150, you can start your own business from the comfort of your living room. Software would cost you less than $130, which would get you a copy of MovieCaptioner and an upgrade to QuickTime Pro. Now all you need is a web page (free from Blogger.com), a domain name ($19.95 per year), and a file upload service such as DropBox.com, where you and your customers can transfer large files over the Internet. Optional items could include headphones and a copy of Dragon Dictate if you really don't like typing that much (as I don't). With Dragon Dictate, you simply repeat what you hear in the headphones into the microphone, and it gets typed into the MovieCaptioner interface automatically! A set of headphones with a built-in microphone would be helpful in doing it this way.

So you have MovieCaptioner and QuickTime Pro, and you've picked out a domain name and have gotten a website put together so you can hang a shingle out for the world to see. A customer inquires about your rates (which you've done your research to see what other companies with similar services are charging). You send them your email address and let them know they can use that to send you their video files via DropBox.com, which gives you up to 2 GB of space for free (you can upgrade to more space for a fee). You share a DropBox with your customer and the files are instantly available to both of you. You import the video into MovieCaptioner, click the Start button, and go to town. After you get your captions done, you export to the format your customer requires, and either email the captioned text file back to them or embed the captions in the movie and throw it back in your DropBox and let them know it's done. An interim step could be to export a transcript with timecode and let them proofread it if they want. That way they can check the spellings of names, technical terms, and so forth. Payment can be done easily via PayPal, Kagi, or another credit card transaction service. You can typically make anywhere from $75 to $150 for a one hour video.

Please be aware that depending on your typing skills and the quality of the audio, a one hour video could take anywhere from 5 to 8 hours to transcribe. This type of work is not for everybody, but some really enjoy it. It is, at least, an easy way to make several hundred dollars or more in a week's time, with a very modest investment to get started. This is a business that a stay-at-home mom or dad can run or even a college student to do over the summer to pay for books and tuition. The potential is there to expand and make a much larger enterprise too if you wanted. Teaming up with others you trust to do good work (see oDesk.com and eLance.com) where you pay them part of the profits to handle your overflow will allow you to handle much more volume.

I hope this may spark some interest and that more people will join in the pursuit of making the world's video accessible to all.

Please try MovieCaptioner to make your movies accessible. You can download a free 14 day demo.

Troubleshooting SCC (Line 21) Caption Files

2011-06-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

From time to time you may get an error in your SCC caption files. Here is a (hopefully) helpful strategy for zeroing in on the cause of the problem. Knowing that it is a bad file in the first place is simple. I try to open it in QuickTime Pro. To be able to do this, however, you need to download a free plugin from Apple for importing SCC files into QuickTime. It is called "ClosedCaptionImporter.component". It can be downloaded (currently) from this link: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/ClosedCaptionImporter/Introduction/Intro.html.

Once you download it, just drop the plugin into your QuickTime folder in your hard drive's Library folder...

If you have QuickTime 7 open, you'll need to close it to make the plugin available when you re-open it. Note that as of this writing, QuickTime 7 is necessary for all the features of QuickTime Pro to work. QuickTime X, the default QT Player that comes standard with Snow Leopard does not have all the functionality of QuickTime 7. You can install QuickTime 7 from your Snow Leopard install disk, then upgrade it to QuickTime Pro via the Apple website. It only costs $30 and it well worth it for the increased ability to work with QuickTime movie files.

So, as long as you have the plugin installed you should be able to see captions in an SCC file that you open in QuickTime Pro. It should look like this...

It should have a white background and if you scrub through the movie, you should see captions. A file that has errors will open like this...

It will have a black background, it will display smaller than a working file, "Scenarist_SCC V1.0" will show at first, and the binary code will display instead of the transcribed captions if you scrub through it. If you see that, then you know you have troubles in River City. Sometimes, though, an SCC file can have a garbage character in it that may allow it to play in QuickTime properly, but will cause an error in other applications.

To troubleshoot this, I'll open the SCC file in BBedit or the free version called Text Wrangler, available from Barebones.com. Here I'll do a quick scan to look for certain types of anomalies. Here are a few types of things I might look for.

A blank caption after the timecode. All lines must have at least some formatting applied, even if there is no text in the caption.

Another thing to look for is unpaired binary code. Every set of alphanumeric digits should be in sets of four usually, although they can come in twos, I believe. MovieCaptioner always creates them in sets of four digits. If you see anywhere where a line ends with a 3 digit number instead of 4, there's probably trouble there. Sometimes this could be caused by a character in the captions that is not supported by the SCC format which can goof up the sequence of numbers.

In the example above, an unsupported character is showing up as a bullet. Instead of it being a 2 digit number to represent the character, it is only one digit, which throws off the rest of that line. Note the last number sequence is only 3 characters long as a result. This will throw an error when it goes to display in QuickTime. The line should have ended with " 942f", but instead it is " 42f".

The other more difficult thing to find is what's known as a timecode overrun. In the SCC format, each caption needs about 1 frame of buffer time per every 2 letters of a caption. If you add all that up and subtract if from the timecode for that line, it should not be less than the timecode preceding it. So the caption "I may be going now" might need 18 frames of buffer time to display. Subtracting 18 frames from its timecode should not run into the timecode of the previous caption. This seems to vary, however, with different captions, so I've not found it to be a hard and fast rule. If someone would verify what this is exactly, I'd love to know myself. Before you can do anything about this, however, you need to find the caption (or captions) that have timecode issues. I do this by opening the SCC file in my text editor and using cut and paste, I test out sections of the file. I will typically select and cut all the captions from the midpoint of the file till the end and save it. I will leave the text editor open while I test the saved SCC file in QuickTime Pro. That way I can undo my cut and try again. I'll drag the SCC file onto the QT icon and see if it opens properly. If it does, I know that the error lies in the last half of the file. I will keep splitting the file in this manner until I get it to work again and then not work again, so I will eventually home in on the line that's giving me the problem. Once I identify the offending line, I will look it over for anomalies as above. If I can't find any, I look at the timecode and count the characters to give me an idea of whether or not the timecodes may be too close. If they do look close, I will start to add frames to the offending line's timecode and saving, then testing in QuickTime Player until I get it to work. I'll then make sure there are no other lines in the SCC file that are causing such problems. These timecode overruns typically are caused when 2 or more captions are long and come in rapid succession. I will sometimes have to abbreviate words or divide the captions more evenly to iron out this problem.

But how do you find the captions in your project when all you can read is binary code??? Well, I've got an answer for that. It's called SCC Caption Decoder, a lightweight application that will decode an SCC file and save it as a text transcript that is human readable.

This really helps. After running the file through SCC Caption Decoder I can look for that same timecode where the problem was and know what the captions says so I can find it in my caption project. You can't just go by timecode necessarily because for the SCC format, the buffer time is built into the caption's timecode, so even though you set a caption at 00:04:21:07, the buffer time might change it to 00:04:20:01, for example. SCC Caption Decoder can also convert the time to what the original time was if you select the optional radio button. If you don't need the timecode, it can also save it in paragraph text form as well. It's a handy little tool for people who work with SCC captions a lot, and is really great if you just want a text transcript of what an SCC file contains. Give it a try. There are both Windows and Mac versions and you can try it out for 7 days. Cost to purchase is only $19.95. A convenient tool to have in your arsenal.

Please try MovieCaptioner to make your movies accessible. You can download a free 14 day demo.

Making Closed Captions That Can Be Turned On and Off

2011-05-12T06:19:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a lot of queries recently about how to make subtitles that can be turned on and off. One way, of course is the embedded SCC captions that are supported by QuickTime. These are the type of closed captions you see on TV. MovieCaptioner will add these to your movie automatically if you choose that particular export option. To turn these on and off just go to the View menu in the QuickTime Player and select Show Closed Captioning or Hide Closed Captioning. In the browser you'll get a CC button to toggle them on and off.

I've recently discovered that there is another, perhaps more visually pleasing way to add soft subtitles, those that can be turned on and off, to a movie using MovieCaptioner and HandBrake. I use MovieCaptioner to create my captions and get them all synched up with the movie. Then I export as a .SRT caption file.

Once I have my caption file created, I open HandBrake, a free video tool that I'll use to add the soft subtitles. It will ask you to load your movie, then just click the Subtitle tab in the middle of the window.

That will enable the Add External SRT button. Click that button and locate the .SRT caption file you exported from MovieCaptioner. It will be added to the Track window below the button. Once you see it appear there, just click the Start button at the top of HandBrake and it will create a new m4v movie with subtitles embedded in it. They appear as white over a translucent background.

If you don't see them when you first start playing the movie, go to the View menu in QuickTime Player and select the Subtitles menu item to turn them on. They can be turned off this way as well.

SRT subtitles are a nice alternative and works in both QuickTime 7 and QuickTime X. I've not gotten these to work in a browser yet, so if you've had success with doing this, drop me an email.

Please try MovieCaptioner to make your movies accessible. You can download a free 14 day demo.

Why Customer Support Is So Important

2011-03-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

I was pretty surprised to read emails from my customers who do closed captioning for their videos, saying things like, "it really is amazing to have such great service" and you "offer amazingly responsive customer support". Why am I surprised? Because I just can't believe that other companies and especially software developers aren't seeing customer service as a rare chance to really connect with their customers as I do. I am fortunate not to get too many technical problem reports on MovieCaptioner. I can't say it's really luck, though. At first I had my share of issues to deal with, but I listened to my customers and from their problems I was able to see the weak spots in my software and focus on fixing them. Sometimes this required fixing an obvious flaw in the software that just didn't work as it was supposed to, but sometimes it was more a case of controlling the way the user could interact with the software to guide them away from possible problems. Either way, when you do this, you're making a better user experience. I have worked with customers via Skype and iChat, sharing their computer screens so that I could see what they were doing wrong or what problem they were having with the closed caption creation process. I've actually redone parts of people's caption projects when they crashed and lost some work and had a deadline, I've compressed video for others, I've done screen capture videos to show someone a process and took countless screenshots of QT settings, MovieCaptioner Preferences windows, and the like. I figure that if my customers succeed, then I will as well. It may take time, but karma has a way of working things out. One customer emailed me and I could tell he was really irate that somehow his project crashed and he lost a bunch of work. This was about 10PM. I was able to convince him to send me his video and he had a pleasant surprise waiting in his email inbox the next morning. I had redone his project for him. It took me maybe a little over an hour of my time, but I figured it would be worth it. He was absolutely thrilled and promised to pass the word about how great MovieCaptioner was and the excellent support you get with it. Obviously I can't do this for everyone, but I had some time and he had a deadline, so I gave it a shot. I've also learned to have infinite patience, especially with people who are very frustrated or who just don't get it and need a little extra help. It helps me just as much as it helps them, as I get to see what types of people use my software and why they need it. I've added a lot of different features as a result of my work with dealing with customers' issues. I recently implemented a Backups folder that, when you quit out of your project will save any scratch files (used for Undos) to a Backups folder. This folder is available directly from the File menu and projects are listed by the date they were saved. This could, I think, prove to be a lifesaver for someone who has 6 hours of work and somehow loses his project. So, really it's all about listening to your customers and potential customers. You're bound to succeed if give them what they want.

Please try MovieCaptioner to make your movies accessible. You can download a free 14 day demo.