Captioning Tips

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...

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...

First of all, let me explain the difference between closed captions and open captions. Closed captions can be toggled on and off, while open captions are on all the time. Simple and straightforward. Update: Apple is no longer selling QuickTime Pro. If you already have QuickTime Pro, read on. If not, there is an alternative solution here:  http://synchrimedia.blogspot.com/2017/02/creating-open-captions-update.html Open captions are the better choice when the site where the movie is displayed does not support any type of captioning. An example of this is the popular Vimeo site. Since it does not support closed captioning, the captions must be made part of the video and not a separate track. If you attempt to upload a movie that has a video track, a sound track, and a text track, the text track will get stripped out on upload. What we need to do is to burn the text track into the video track. In the video below, I've used MovieCaptioner to embed a text track into a movie. Not...