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...

As you may know, video can be a compelling way to advertise your product or get your message across to millions of people every day. But what you may not know is that by captioning your videos, all the content in your video becomes searchable, and that will give you a huge edge over your competition that may not have captioned their videos.  Closed captioning software has come a long way and it's now easier than ever to add captions to your videos. YouTube, Vimeo, and many others only require you to upload a single closed caption file to make your videos accessible to the deaf population. This will open up your market to a whole new audience. According to the World Federation of the Deaf, there are approximately 70 million deaf people in the world, certainly not a market to overlook. Not only does closed captioning make your content available to those who can't hear, but studies have shown that many hearing people learn better when closed captions are present in the video. It ...

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...

Do you have a deadline you have to meet for captioning a video? One way to get the job done in half the time is to do as the pro wrestlers do and tag team the project. With MovieCaptioner, this is pretty easy to do. Let's break the project up between Person A and Person B. Person A will review the movie and find a spot about halfway through it where there is either no talking, or some type of break, like between sentences. Let's say about 30 minutes into the movie there is a spot where there is no talking and maybe some music starts playing. This might be an ideal spot. Maybe the music begins a 00:31:25.15. Person A tells Person B to start there. Person A just follows the normal work flow. She clicks the Load Movie button, sets the text attributes to what she wants and then hits the Start button to begin captioning the movie. She continues until she reaches the point agreed upon just prior to the music starting. Person B will also open MovieCaptioner and instead of starting at ...

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...