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...

It's really simple to add captions to your YouTube videos. If you're using MovieCaptioner , just use the YouTube export option... This will create a text file with a ".srt" file extension, which you would upload to YouTube after you've uploaded your movie. Just click the CC button under your movie... Then choose Add new subtitles or CC ... Select Upload a file ... Choose Subtitles file and find your SRT file that you exported from MovieCaptioner, then click Upload . After the SRT file uploads, you'll see the captions on the right-hand side of the screen. Just scroll to the bottom and click the Publish button and you're done. Pretty simple.  It will tell you your captions were published...  Now all you need to do is click the CC button on the playbar of your movie and enable your captions.  Please give MovieCaptioner a try. You can download a free, fully-functional demo that is good for 14 days from ...

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...

One of the great things about iBooks is that you can make your movies accessible by providing closed captions. It's very easy to do, too, if you own a Mac and have the right tools. For this tutorial we'll be using the following software: MovieCaptioner MPEG Streamclip QuickTime Pro ClosedCaptionImporter plugin for QuickTime iBooks Author A Little Setup iBooks support a caption format known as Sonic Scenarist (SCC). This format is also known in broadcasting circles as Line 21 captions. To be able to import these captions into our movie, we'll need QuickTime Pro ($30 upgrade to the QuickTime 7 Player from Apple) and the ClosedCaptionImporter plugin for QuickTime from Apple as well. QuickTime 7 is required even though your Mac already ships with QuickTime X, but QuickTime X will not allow you to add captions to your movie, so either download QuickTime 7 from the Apple site or install it from your Mac OS X install disk as a custom install. It will install...

A common problem with creating captions for video is when you run into non-Enlish characters. Asian characters and European accented characters can present special problems for captioning. People will often create QT Text files with these characters... ...and find out they look like gibberish when they view them embedded into their movies. What's the answer? MovieCaptioner tackles this problem by using TeXML files instead of QT Text files to embed captions into a movie. The XML file it creates will support many characters. You can import a Chinese transcript into MovieCaptioner, for example, but you must prepare the file first. Let's say you have a Chinese transcript in Microsoft Word... (Thanks to William Roth, Broadcast Operations Engineer at the Cleveland Clinic for providing this sample transcript.) Don't try to directly import a MS Word document or and RTF file. First, save it as a new "Plain Text" file. After selecting Plain Text and giving...