Captioning Tips

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...

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...

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...

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 o...

To be honest, I'm not a programmer. I actually have a degree in Art (emphasis in drawing), and I often wonder what twists in the road of life led me to this point. MovieCaptioner seems to me to be a coming-together of different interests and knowledge I've gained over the years. About 9 years ago, in my first days of my day job (multimedia specialist for a large college), I was lucky enough to be able to get hired on before my predecessor left. He was a gifted videographer who was moving to another state with his soon-to-be wife. That week he had showed me what he does with QuickTime Pro in regard to adding text tracks to QT movies. I found it quite fascinating and explored the capability even further. I was even eventually able to get a QT movie to trigger Javascript events, something Apple later disabled for fear of security holes, I guess. The problem with text tracks, though, is that it seems to be quite a complicated process for the average Joe. Overly complicated, I tho...