Captioning Tips

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

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

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

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

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