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 ...

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 ...

Let's say you already have a text transcript of your movie and you need to synchronize it. First you'll need to break them up into readable chunks if they aren't already. You'll put carriage returns in the break them into separate captions on each line. Something like 50-60 characters or so looks good usually. You can use your text editor's built-in character counters to get you in the ballpark. Once you have your transcript broken up line by line into captions, you're ready to synchronize it. Make sure it is a plain text file and it has a ".txt" file extension. Open MovieCaptioner and load your movie. You'll be asked to save your project right away after importing your movie. Then go to the Import menu and select Text in Line Form . This will tell MovieCaptioner to treat each separate line as a different caption. Once the transcript is imported, you'll see the Set Timecode button appear at the top of the interface (or access it v...

Updated 5-20-18... An inexpensive way to add SCC captions to your video for broadcast TV is to use Apple's Compressor ($49.95 from the App Store). After creating your captions in MovieCaptioner , export your project as Sonic Scenarist (SCC File Only). This is the file you'll use along with your movie in Compressor.   Open Compressor, then go to to the File menu and select Add File and load your movie into the interface. Then in the Settings panel, select the proper preset that your station expects you to use. Most likely it will be something like MPEG-2 Program Stream, which you'll find under the MPEG Files dropdown menu. Just drag that preset onto the movie panel where it says Add Outputs and it should stick there. With the most recent version of Compressor (4.4), you will next see where it says Captions  right under your movie and to the right of that is a Set link. Click on that and find your SCC caption file on your computer.  It will have a .scc file ex...

A reader had a movie with a QuickTime Text track and wanted to be able to use those captions for other caption formats. To do this you will need QuickTime Pro, a $30 upgrade to the QuickTime 7 Player from Apple. Start by opening your captioned movie in QuickTime Pro, then go to the Movie Properties window (under the Window menu). Select the Text Track, then click the Extract button... This will open the Text Track as a new movie. Now go to the File menu and select Export. Use the pulldown menu to select Text to Text, give the file a name and click Save... This will create a QT Text file which you can import into MovieCaptioner. Now open MovieCaptioner, load your movie and save your project. Then go to the Import menu and select "QT Text". Once the text and timecode are loaded you can export as any format you see under the Export menu. You can download a free 14-day, fully functional demo of MovieCaptioner and try it for yourself and see why so many are turning to ...

A reader recently asked if there was a way to import CAP files into MovieCaptioner. MovieCaptioner currently does not import CAP files directly, but there is a way, thanks to YouTube. As you may know, YouTube can import and display captions. What you may not know is that CAP files (with the .cap file extension) are one of the formats YouTube can accept. YouTube can also accept SRT (what MovieCaptioner uses for the YouTube caption export), SUB, SBV, and MPsub files. So, all you need to do is upload a movie to YouTube or use a movie you already have up there. It does not matter if it's the same movie that the CAP file goes to or how long the movie is. After you have a movie on YouTube, go to YouTube's Video Manager, check the box next to the video you want to edit, and use the pulldown menu next to your video to select Captions. This will take you to a new screen where you will choose your caption file to upload. Just click the Add New Track button and find your CAP file on...