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...

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...

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...