Captioning Tips

Updated 5-20-18... An inexpensive way to add SCC captions to your video for broadcast TV is to use Apple's Compressor ($49.95 from the App Store). After creating your captions in MovieCaptioner , export your project as Sonic Scenarist (SCC File Only). This is the file you'll use along with your movie in Compressor.   Open Compressor, then go to to the File menu and select Add File and load your movie into the interface. Then in the Settings panel, select the proper preset that your station expects you to use. Most likely it will be something like MPEG-2 Program Stream, which you'll find under the MPEG Files dropdown menu. Just drag that preset onto the movie panel where it says Add Outputs and it should stick there. With the most recent version of Compressor (4.4), you will next see where it says Captions  right under your movie and to the right of that is a Set link. Click on that and find your SCC caption file on your computer.  It will have a .scc file ex...

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...

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...