Captioning Tips

I've gotten a lot of queries recently about how to make subtitles that can be turned on and off. One way, of course is the embedded SCC captions that are supported by QuickTime. These are the type of closed captions you see on TV. MovieCaptioner will add these to your movie automatically if you choose that particular export option. To turn these on and off just go to the View menu in the QuickTime Player and select Show Closed Captioning or Hide Closed Captioning. In the browser you'll get a CC button to toggle them on and off. I've recently discovered that there is another, perhaps more visually pleasing way to add soft subtitles, those that can be turned on and off, to a movie using MovieCaptioner and HandBrake. I use MovieCaptioner to create my captions and get them all synched up with the movie. Then I export as a .SRT caption file. Once I have my caption file created, I open HandBrake, a free video tool that I'll use to add the soft subtitles. It will ask you to lo...

I was pretty surprised to read emails from my customers who do closed captioning for their videos, saying things like, "it really is amazing to have such great service" and you "offer amazingly responsive customer support". Why am I surprised? Because I just can't believe that other companies and especially software developers aren't seeing customer service as a rare chance to really connect with their customers as I do. I am fortunate not to get too many technical problem reports on MovieCaptioner. I can't say it's really luck, though. At first I had my share of issues to deal with, but I listened to my customers and from their problems I was able to see the weak spots in my software and focus on fixing them. Sometimes this required fixing an obvious flaw in the software that just didn't work as it was supposed to, but sometimes it was more a case of controlling the way the user could interact with the software to guide them away from possible ...

Don't you really like it when you go to a restaurant and there's a sign that says "Free Refills" on your drink? Well, I know a lot of people think I'm crazy, but that's my philosophy when someone purchases my software. Once you buy, you're in the club. You get free upgrades for as long as I continue to offer the software. Isn't that the way it should be? Why do software companies charge a premium for new versions of their software when often it's just a bunch of bug fixes anyway? Why should I have to pay for someone to fix what they should have gotten right in the first place? The way I feel is that free upgrades are a nod to my previous customers, a way of saying "thanks!" for supporting the software early on and helping me to improve it. When MovieCaptioner was first released a few years ago it had its share of major bugs, and being new to the software arena, I knew that I had to make up for my lack of programming ability by always stri...

Although I'm very grateful to Apple for their support of captions and accessibility in general, I do think that QuickTime needs some attention. With Snow Leopard, a new QT Player is automatically installed, called Quicktime X. Although QuickTime X has some nice features, like being able to record screen action, it has a number of faults as well. As soon as Snow Leopard was released, I found that my s/w for adding captions to movies, MovieCaptioner , was broken and I had to scramble to fix it. It turns out that QuickTime X does not have the same editing features as QuickTime 7 Pro, which I was leveraging for my s/w. QuickTime X cannot import text tracks, so in order to do so, you need to get your Snow Leopard install disk and do a custom install of QuickTime 7, then register it as the Pro version. Okay, so if you get QuickTime 7 Pro installed, you're back in business. But there are some other issues I'd like Apple to address in QuickTime as well. 1. Support for QuickTime spr...

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...