Solving technology problems, one at a time
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.
Continue readingSynching 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 line of caption text.
Lacking anything better at the moment, I use Producer to do the synching: Play your video in Producer for the length of one phrase, stop it, note the timing, and use “control-tab” to switch to a text editor where the SAMI file is being edited.
I found this procedure a bit slow, and had some problems with getting the exact timing right, but it does work. Complete instructions for captioning with Producer are available as a (Windows-only .exe file !) download HERE
A non .exe resource for understanding SAMI files is HERE
Continue readingIn 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 in the room that need to be heard.
There are also a few people with hearing disabilities that need the captions. So I’ve been searching for a captioning method for all our streaming video that is efficient, and creates web-based video that is compatible with Windows and Macintosh computers.
Although the Virage system will be ideal for this (voice recognition and screen-scraping create searchable, linked chunks of text associated with the exact locations in the video where they occurred.), it will not be in place soon enough.
Creating captions on VHS/DVD formats would be a nice capability, as well.
Continue reading