In Education Technology Services
at Penn State, we're putting forth an effort to make accessibility
part of the process of creating videos. Creating accessible videos
not only opens your content to a wider audience,
but it is also searchable, and it will help to get your video noticed.
Many students also find that the captions help them understand what is being said,
and it helps them to learn. To this end, we've created this short video
that will show you the process we'll be using in order to caption
videos that were created in our department.
I'll be using a combination of MovCaptioner for the Mac
and MacSpeech Dictate and a pair of headphones with a built-in microphone.
Since MacSpeech Dictate
is trained to recognize the way I say words, I can't just play the movie
and let MacSpeech try to transcribe it directly.
It will result in many errors. With even the basic training
that MacSpeech provides, however, I should be able to get pretty accurate
results for most captions. We'll begin by hooking the headphones
up to the computer. Okay, after I have my headphones connected
I'm going to open my System Preferences and got to the Sound
control panel. I'm giong to make sure the C-Media USB Audio Device
is selected for both the input and the output
and I'll make sure my input
volume is set up to 3/4 or so, which is usually good.
Output is set. Okay, I'm all ready.
I'm going to open MacSpeech Dictate, get that ready to go.
Once it opens I'm going to select the sound profile
for this headset I'm using. I'll make that active.
And this was created by going through a simple
voice training with MacSpeech Dictate.
And by default, MacSpeech Dictate opens with Note Pad,
which will type out everything you say, but we're not going to
use Note Pad. Instead we're going to use MovCaptioner.
So I'll open that up and
once that opens I'm just going to load my movie,
which I have on the Desktop here.
And I'll save my project. I'm just saving to the Desktop
to make it easy.
Okay, the way MovCaptioner works is
we're not going to use the playhead here. We're going to use the Start button down
here, and it's going to start looping through the movie
in four-second increments.
And this can be adjusted by either going forward or backwards
on the left and right buttons, but we'll leave it at 4.
When I click the Start button, it will start looping through the first four seconds
and I'm going to activate MacSpeech
and it will start typing whatever
I say, and I'm just going to repeat what I hear in the
headphones, and once I get the caption
in the way I want it, I'm just going to hit the Return key
and it will go on to the next four seconds of the video. So let's give it a try.
I'm going to activate
MacSpeech Dictate.
Just before lunch one day
a puppet show
was
put on at school
period. It was called Mr.
Bungle goes
to lunch
period. It was fun to watch. period.
period.
In the puppet show Mr.
Bungle
came to the boys
room
on his way to lunch
period. He looked at his hands. period.
period
His hands were dirty
and his hair
was messy
comma. but Mr. Bungle didn't
stop
to
wash his hands or comb his hair.
comma
he went right to lunch
period.
left bracket. children laughing
right bracket
So you get the idea.
Now, there were a couple times. Oops, let's turn the dicatation off here.
There were a couple
times when I had to stop and do a little edit here and there,
but it doesn't slow you down too much if you can hit it on the fly before
you hit the Return button, and
you also noticed that I pronunced any punctuation
that I had like periods, commas, and at the end the
left bracket and the right bracket, and I would continue this process
until I got through the whole movie. Once I got through the movie
I can Preview and see what it looks like in QuickTime.
So we'll give that a shot down here. It's the button on the lower right.
And you can see my captions have [ Just before lunch one day...]
come up. {...a puppet show was put on at school. It was called...]
[...Mr. Bungle goes to lunch. It was fun to watch. ]
[In the puppet...]
[show, Mr. Bungle came to the boys room on his way to lunch...]
[ He looked at his hands. His hands were dirty...]
[ and his hair was messy. But Mr. Bungle...]
[ didn't stop to wash his hands or comb his hair. He went right...]
[ to lunch. ] Okay,
and you noticed there were a few times where
maybe I could break up the text a little better here. Let's say I
want the first word of this sentence to be on the next line.
What I can do is I can go
over here (let's move this out)
and I'm going to select that
and I'm going to type the pipe symbol. It's the key right above Return.
and hit Enter.
And you can see it puts a forced carriage return there.
Now this symbol will not show up in the final.
It's just there as a marker. So, I can break
the type up anywhere I want. I would normally try to break
it at a comma or a period or
someplace that makes sense, or maybe make the
sentences break up in half. So let's
give that a try again and see if it looks any better.
[ Just before lunch one day, a puppet show was put on at school. ]
[ It was called Mr. Bungle goes to lunch.]
[ It was fun to watch. ]
[ In the puppet show, Mr. Bungle came to the boys room.]
So you can see where it moved it to the second line, and
you don't see that character, the pipe symbol, there.
And there was another one further down here.
There.
So, you can reformat the text any way you want
Once you get all the captions the way you want it, you have a variety of
export formats: Embedded QuickTime,
which looks similar to what we just did,
Embedded QuickTime (Unicode) might be better if you have a lot of foreign characters
which QuickTime doesn't normally support,
but doing it with a Unicode XML file does.
QuickTime SMIL is actually what we use for Preview, and we can use
Flash, JW Player, some others
for DVDs,
Sonic Scenarist is used for broadcasting and
for iPods and iTunes.
It will actually embed that for you. We can try
that real quick here. And
you'll need a special plugin for this, which is free from
Apple. So, it will give you an idea.
[ Just before lunch one day, a puppet show was put on at school.] And is scales up nicely.
[ It was called Mr. Bungle goes to lunch. ] It's the kind you see on TV.
[ It was fun to watch. ]
Okay, and if you're going
to YouTube, you could use
SubRip SRT or SubViewer SUB
formats. Either one will work. If you have a Windows
Media file that you're using, you'll need the Flip4Mac
plugin for QuickTime, but it will do the
SAMI version of captioning for Windows Media.
And you can also create transcripts either in paragraph form
or line-by-line with timecode.
And you can also do those same things as an HTML file.
MovCaptioner also allows you to import
quite a few different formats as well, so if you already have a
caption file, you can import it. You can import
text in paragraph form and then retime it, and I can
get into that in another video, but
it leaves you some options. There are some editing options as well
that might come in handy for certain things,
such as broadcasting and text formatting.
So, that's MovCaptioner, and we're going to give it a try this year
and see if we can make a difference and streamline
our captioning process.