Captioning Tips

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...

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 h...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...