One Q to Rule Them All

Although I'm very grateful to Apple for their support of captions and accessibility in general, I do think that QuickTime needs some attention. With Snow Leopard, a new QT Player is automatically installed, called Quicktime X. Although QuickTime X has some nice features, like being able to record screen action, it has a number of faults as well. As soon as Snow Leopard was released, I found that my s/w for adding captions to movies, MovieCaptioner, was broken and I had to scramble to fix it. It turns out that QuickTime X does not have the same editing features as QuickTime 7 Pro, which I was leveraging for my s/w. QuickTime X cannot import text tracks, so in order to do so, you need to get your Snow Leopard install disk and do a custom install of QuickTime 7, then register it as the Pro version. Okay, so if you get QuickTime 7 Pro installed, you're back in business. But there are some other issues I'd like Apple to address in QuickTime as well.

1. Support for QuickTime sprite tracks

QuickTime X does not seem to support sprite tracks. With QuickTime 7 I can add a little CC button to my QT movie so that you can toggle the captions on and off. I would love to add this feature to MovieCaptioner, however, the fact that most Mac users will not have QuickTime 7 installed makes it a dead issue. So many people would love this option!

2. Windows support for creating SCC captions

On the Mac, you can get the ClosedCaptionImporter.component plugin for QuickTime, which allows you to import Sonic Scenarist (SCC) caption files to make broadcast-style captions for your QuickTime movies. MovieCaptioner automates this process. Unfortunately, this plugin or capability is missing from the Windows version of QuickTime. If Apple could create a plugin for QuickTime that allows SCC caption imports, then people on Windows could create accessible movies for iPods and iTunes as well as Mac users.

3. Windows SMIL captions garble the audio

MovieCaptioner uses the QT SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) format to do previews of your captioning project. On windows, though, using the SMIL format results in audio that sounds like it went through the blender. Play the movie by itself and it sounds perfect, but play it through the SMIL file and you get total garbage. This has been identified as a bug for over a year at least, and I've seen no progress towards fixing it.

[UPDATE on 3/3/11] After trying every trick in the book for QT and Windows sound settings, I found that by opening a QT SMIL movie in the QT Player for Windows and going to the AV Controls (under the Window menu) I could fix the sound by moving the Pitch Shift control slightly to the left. This is hardly a "fix", though, since you would have to do this for every SMIL movie you opened and the AV controls are not available to movies that are embedded in a web page. It may, at least, provide Apple with a hint as to how to fix the issue. I've reported this as a QT bug to Apple with this new info.

I must say again that I love Apple's operating system and just about everything else, but I sure wish that these QuickTime issues would be resolved soon, so I can make my software better. And it would be nice if we only needed one version of QuickTime. One Q to rule them all.

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Troubleshooting SCC (Line 21) Caption Files

Image
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 function...
Read more

Creating Open Captions - An Update

Image
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 ...
Read more

Synchronizing Transcripts to Your Video the Easy Way

Image
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 v...
Read more