A couple years ago I was asked to take some video clips (flash files stripped from the internet with permission), add captions, and prepare them to be played on a kiosk (via dvd).
It took significant trial and error but I documented the final process as “not as painful as it could have been”. I haven’t had a project like that since so there may be better tools now but here is a basic overview what I did.
- Convert .flv files to .avi
- Upload videos to youtube
- Transcribe video
- Transcripts need to include sound effects for proper captioning
- This could be done as part of step 6
- Upload transcripts to YouTube to get a .sbv file with timing
- Note: It doesn’t work as well with videos that are mostly sound effects so those videos will require way more adjusting in step 6.
- Convert the resulting .sbv to .srt using your tool of choice
- http://www.gidsgoldberg.com/sbv_docs_converter.shtml
- http://www.dcmp.org/ciy/converting-youtube-to-srt.html
- Any number of others Google probably knows about
- Use VisualSubSync to adjust the timing and fine tune the captions.
- Save the results back to an .srt file Test the captions (optional) by uploading the .srt file back to YouTube Stitch the .avi and the .srt file together using Auto Gordian Knot (http://www.autogk.me.uk/*) to create a “hard captioned” video Burn hard captioned videos to DVD
It’s possible that visualsubsync (which is exactly what I would expect a subtitle editor to be) will also auto synchronize captions. If so, you could eliminate the google/youtube steps.
Other Resources
- Captioning Key (Guidelines for captioning)
- Media Access Group at WGBH Captioning FAQ
- Sub-titling text add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint (Stamp)
- Captioning YouTube Video and Providing Accessible Controls
- JW Player – Adding Video Captions
Note: the link for Auto Gordian Knot is broken as of this posting. Not sure if it’s permanently down but there are places to download the software if you Google it.