Captioning Tips

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 ...

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...

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...

By default, MovieCaptioner puts your captions at the bottom of your movie. If using QT Text captions, your choice is either below the movie, where it doesn't interfere with the movie at all, or you can have them overlaid over the lower portion of the movie either with a black background or with a 50% translucent background. What do you do, however, if you have a movie that has some content at the bottom, such as a lower third (speaker's name and title for instance) or some other content that you don't want covered? Again, you have 2 choices. One would be to use Sonic Scenarist (SCC) captions. These are the same type you see on TV and are supported by Apple's iTunes. The other choice would be to stick with QT Text captions, but do a little manual manipulation. Let's look at each. Sonic Scenarist (SCC) Captions Using both SCC caption and QT Text captions, you will need QuickTime 7 Pro ($30 upgrade to QuickTime 7 Player from Apple). With the SCC captions, you can plac...

Do you like to watch movies? Can you type fairly quickly? Congratulations, you are now qualified as a video transcriptionist. And just in time, too, as there will be a gold rush soon for video transcription services. In October 2010, President Obama signed into law the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which mandates further captioning of video for the Web. The bill will apply to any video that was originally aired on TV. As more and more videos are uploaded to the web, the demand for video captioning services will grow at an exponential rate. Government agencies, schools, museums, and many other types of businesses will need the services of a good video transcriptionist. Your biggest problem may be keeping up with the demand. For about $150, you can start your own business from the comfort of your living room. Software would cost you less than $130, which would get you a copy of MovieCaptioner and an upgrade to QuickTime Pro. Now all you need is a web page (fr...

From time to time you may get an error in your SCC caption files. Here is a (hopefully) helpful strategy for zeroing in on the cause of the problem. Knowing that it is a bad file in the first place is simple. I try to open it in QuickTime Pro. To be able to do this, however, you need to download a free plugin from Apple for importing SCC files into QuickTime. It is called "ClosedCaptionImporter.component". It can be downloaded (currently) from this link: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/ClosedCaptionImporter/Introduction/Intro.html . Once you download it, just drop the plugin into your QuickTime folder in your hard drive's Library folder... If you have QuickTime 7 open, you'll need to close it to make the plugin available when you re-open it. Note that as of this writing, QuickTime 7 is necessary for all the features of QuickTime Pro to work. QuickTime X, the default QT Player that comes standard with Snow Leopard does not have all the function...