Captioning your online videos makes a difference. In the US alone, there are an estimated 28 million people with hearing loss. The vast majority of these people do not know sign language. In addition there are many individuals who speak English as a second language who appreciate the re-enforcement. If you're able to caption your videos in English, you'll also have the ability to translate into other languages with captions. Captioning reaches a mostly unappreciated audience, and videos with captioning get far more views than those without.

The following is a list of resources for individuals interested in captioning their own videos for the internet. Except where noted, these methods can be applied without any additonal cost. If you get stuck anywhere in the process feel free to contact me at webmaster@redeemeryakima.org.

Outline:

• What is "Closed Captioning"?.
• Advantages to Captioning.
• What skills are required?
• How does Internet Captioning work?
• Captioning Software and training guides.
• Scripting your own captioned videos for use on your website.
• Making common Windows Media Player playback captioned text from your website.
• Captioning in Silverlight and one option for Mac Users.
• Some common questions.

What is "Closed Captioning?:
Closed Captions are subtitles that can be either open and seen, or "closed" and not seen. They are different from subtitles which are permanently visible. The international symbol for Closed Captioning is a television shaped box containing the letters "CC".

The technology behind television CC and internet CC is different. What will be discussed here is Internet Captioning.

Other than turning the words on and off, are there other advantages to Closed Captioning?:
Yes. Most of the advantages to Closed Captioning are on the production end, because the Captioned text can be edited apart from the video with a separate program in an efficient manner.

You CAN use your movie editing program's "Add Title" function to place subtitles on a video, but this is a very inefficient and imprecise option with less than desirable visual results.

Here's why:
- the text will not have a contrasting background. (like a black box)
- the text font size may change from one word set showing to another. As the number of characters increases, the size of the letters automatically decreases.
- you can't correct or translate the text into another language in post production without completely re-burning the video.
- Most movie editors employ sliding markers for word placement. It takes a lot of trial and error to get phrases - and spaces - to appear and disappear where you want them.


Here is an example of a Subtitled Video (NOT CC) done in Microsoft's "Windows Movie Maker". Using the "Title" or "Subtitle" function in your movie editor can be used effectively in some situations. But, for conversational dialog, the task of word placement and spaces inbetween is exceptionally cumbersome.


Does Close Captioning require special computer skills? Can anyone do this?
Anyone can caption online videos. Some sites, such as YouTube and Dotsub.com, require only that you upload a video and then upload a caption file. The caption file is prepared separately by you in Captioning Software and then uploaded after your video is uploaded. After that, you can then either embed or hyperlink the video into your website.

In October 2009, Google/YouTube announced that they will soon start automatic Closed Captioning for every video uploaded! It wouldn't be necessary to go further in this topic if it were not the case that YouTube and other similar sites have duration limits or other problems. On YouTube the duration limit is 10 minutes. If you want to avoid chopping a sermon in half ( or asking your pastor to speed things up) other alternatives need to be considered. The rest of this tutorial describes what you need to know to create a fully idependent options from your website, and it assumes that you have the ability to upload individual files to your website server.

How does Internet Captioning work?

Closed Captioning is really two major components: the video itself, and a separate coded text file. Closed Captions are not embedded in the video. They are a separate entity. That separate text file is prepared in Captioning Software, like "Subtitle Workshop", and saved as either a ".sub", ".srt" or ".smi / sami" file. On top of that, there is a set of instructions, a "player", which has to be uploaded to the website in the same location as the other two files. It is that "player" that plays the video and the caption file at the same time.


These files are really nothing more than text files (.txt) that contains scripted code in the header which indicate things like format and font size, color, and background color. Each line of text has its own set of timing codes preceding it which cause the text to appear and disappear when you want them to. There are Captioning Programs that create this scripting for you, and save the file to the format required. Here's what part of an .smi (SAMI) file looks like:

<SAMI>
<HEAD>
<STYLE TYPE="Text/css">
<!--
P {margin-left: 29pt; margin-right: 29pt; font-size: 24pt; text-align: center; font-family: Tahoma; font-weight: bold; color: #FFFFFF; background-color: #000000;}
.SUBTTL {Name: 'Subtitles'; Lang: en-US; SAMIType: CC;}
-->
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<SYNC START=24100>
<P CLASS=SUBTTL>[ congregation singing<br>the end of a hymn ]
<SYNC START=27800>
<P CLASS=SUBTTL>&nbsp;
<SYNC START=40101>
<P CLASS=SUBTTL>Grace and Mercy, and Peace<br>are all yours
<SYNC START=43601>
<P CLASS=SUBTTL>&nbsp;
<SYNC START=43602>
<P CLASS=SUBTTL>from our living Lord<br>Jesus Christ, Amen.
<SYNC START=47102>
<P CLASS=SUBTTL>&nbsp;




CAPTIONING SOFTWARE
Programs like "Subtitle Workshop" give you the flexibility to work on and save your work on your computer over many sessions . This page contains a power point presentation and a screenshot tuturial on how to use URUSOFT's Subtitle Workshop (donationware):

http://www.redeemeryakima.org/training.html


SCRIPTING ON YOUR OWN

Longtailvideo, contains wizards that automate code for you and the "player" program that you have to upload along with your Caption file and video. This site basically walks you through the same steps that YouTube does automatically. Below are some links on that site with some examples I used a long time ago to create a flash .flv video. This site is constantly updated, so it's worth your time to look around the site for other more recent format options.

This first link provides a flash .flv player file.
http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/

a construction wizard within this site:
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player-setup-wizard

Here is an example of a video I did using the flash technique generated from this site:
http://www.redeemeryakima.org/Sermon8-17-2008.html

and the code used... (note the required "addVariable" for captions!) This is what goes on your .html file.
--------------
<em>
<div id="player" style="height: 340px; width: 517px; position: relative; left: 44px; top: 7px;"> This line positions the player and also designates a size larger than your video for the player frame.

<script type="text/javascript" src="../../swfobject.js">
</script> <script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject('http://www.yourwebsite.org/mediaplayer.swf','mpl','406','332','8') Mediaplayer.swf is the player existing on your website.
;so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always')
;so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true')
;so.addVariable('height','332') Height and width have to match the same instructions three lines up (green)
;so.addVariable('width','406')
;so.addVariable('file','Sermon8-17-2008.flv') this is the video file which has to be "flash video" .flv format.
;so.addVariable('image','revelation.jpg') this is simply an opening picture, in this case, John on Patmos.
;so.addVariable('captions','http://www.yourwebsite.org/Sermon8-17-2008.srt') The path to your caption file.
;so.write('player');</script>
</div>
</em>
--------------


HOW TO GET WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER TO SHOW CAPTIONS

One little known way to caption a video is to upload a .smi extension caption file to the same location as your .wmv file. The most recent versions of Windows Media Player look for .smi files and play them by default. Older players require that the user "turn on" their caption option ahead of time. One thing I haven't worked out is how to get the text to align in the center. So far all of the videos I've tried this with end up with the text over to the left and in Times Roman font.

CAPTIONING IN SILVERLIGHT
If you have Microsoft Expression Encoder 2, you can import .smi captions using the metadata tab's "Script Commands" section. Encoder 1 did not have this ability. One important thing to remember here is that you cannot have lines greater than 35 characters each. Exceeding that limit results in no words showing at all.

An example of a captioned movie in Silverlight:
http://www.redeemeryakima.org/silverlight2/Psalm82.html



AT LEAST ONE MAC OPTION
Mac people might be interested in this great tutorial by Israel Melendez. http://tecnocato.podbean.com/2007/11/04/tecnocato-008-how-to-closed-caption-cc/
Here, the movie editing program is "Quicktime Pro" assisted with the use of "Annotation Edit". The captioning text is in .scc format.



COMMON QUESTIONS:


HOW LONG DOES THIS TAKE?
Efficiency improves with practice. The first videos I did seemed to take up to a week at a couple hours per evening. The most recent 20-minute sermon I did took 5 hours. The time required is a lot, but consider the return in the size of your audience: Captioning is all the difference between a video with a few hundred views and one with several thousand over a few months. And, you can work at any pace you want, a little at a time, saving between sessions.

HOW DO I MAKE DVD's WITH CLOSED CAPTIONING?
DVD's contain .ifo and .vob files. The captioning is encoded into these files. I haven't yet figured out how to manipulate these files to contain captioning. If anyone knows, please contact me or leave your method on this wiki.