TELic: A blog about Technology Enhanced Learning

Subtitles for videos

I’ve just used the new subtitling feature in Camtasia v7 and it really makes it easy to synchronise the script with the video – you just click on a word in the script when you hear it to divide the script into two or three line chunks. So ideally the process takes only a little longer than the video itself.

The test video in question is A guide to making your thesis available online. This 10-minute presentation introduces e-theses, outlines their benefits and the issues they raise and describes the process requird to create and submit them. It is also available as an Adobe Presenter slideshow.

I uploaded the resultant MP4 to EdShare and was disappointed to find that the captions are not supported (I think). A quick dig around Google indicated that FlowPlayer (used by EdShare) can support captions, so I’ll ask if its possible to get that extension installed.

I then uploaded the same file to YouTube, plus the captions in SubRip format (essentially text plus timecodes). Camtasia can export your captions as a SubRip file, so it only took a couple of minutes to create a fully accesible video. Just click CC in the control bar to view the captions.