http://thedesignspace.net/ My daily explorations, troubleshooting, solutions and discoveries. en-us ellen@thedesignspace.net Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:09:29 -0500 http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000564.html http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000563.html A colleague at work needed to know how to turn on captions in Windows Media Player. I started to write her a note explaining it, but needed to check exactly how to get to the setting since I knew how to do it in older versions but not 11. This turned out to be just another opportunity to experience Microsoft's... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000534.html Creating a captions file... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000453.html Over the last couple of years, Microsoft Producer has become less and less of a viable option for synching powerpoint and video. Probably because of browser changes, it works on less browsers than before, and is no longer compatible even with Powerpoint 2007. So I went in search of a Flash-based replacement for MS Producer. I've found it in the... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000357.html .style2 {color: #FF0000} Subtitle Workshop, by Urusoft is free captioning software (donation-ware) which allows you to easily transcribe and edit captions and output the resulting file to many different formats. I'll be focusing on Windows Media format here, but you will find this a useful tool for captioning DVD's, Quicktime, and Flash as well. Note: A much more complete exposition... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000161.html When using Subtitle Workshop for creating Quicktime captions I found that the settings supplied with the program for Quicktime are incorrect. This can be fixed by creating a new Custom format and saving it in the Custom Formats folder inside the Subtitle Workshop folder.... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000146.html If you purchase the MS Producer resource disk available here HERE you will find it contains an example of a Captioned Video template, along with this white paper captioning in Producer (MS Word format) I found the one captioning template on the CD (captioned video with fixed-size slides) was a good beginning but quickly realized I needed several others. I... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000141.html In Subtitle Workshop, trying to use the Join tool to join two SAMI files and recalculate the timings would result in this error every time: The following error (EConvertError) was derived from object TfrmJoin (frmJoin): "" is not a valid floating point value" The solution is: open each of the original SAMI files in turn and make sure to give... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000080.html Creating SAMI files for Windows Media Player is now quite easy, using Subtitle Workshop, but I had a lot of trouble getting captions to play correctly. They would play just fine locally on my hard drive, but once I put them on a webserver, they wouldn't play at all. That made me think it was a path problem, but finding... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000079.html Here are the steps I use to create a new captioning file in Subtitle Workshop. Create a new file. (File-->New Subtitle-->Save-->Select a format, then double click its icon-->in Save AS dialog, Browse to chosen location, type in a file name, and hit "save" ) Under "Movie," open the video you want to caption. Hit the insert key to create a... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000078.html I'm not quite ready to say it's the Holy Grail of closed captioning, but Subtitle Workshop by Urusoft.net for Windows is really pretty good. It is not buggy, like Magpie, and it saves to any of about 20 different formats, including SAMI. It can be downloaded from HERE.... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000057.html Synching Sami files using MS Producer: I received the MS Producer resources disk in the mail, and it contained one example of a template that has a captioning window below the video area. To use it, you need to create a "SAMI" file, which is a text file with HTML-style tags to describe the captioning styles and timing for each... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000046.html In the web environment I develop for - a busy hospital - having some kind of captioning on presentations that include an audio track is not optional. Videos and narrated presentations are watched in common areas, and it's not always possible to locate a pair of headphones or even convenient to use them if there are other things going on...