Adding Captions to Windows Media Movies Using Microsoft Expresssion Encoder 4

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

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.

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!

Creating Video Captions with Asian and Other Accented Characters

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

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.

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.

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

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!