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March 25, 2005
Fun with captions
After some discussions on the videoblogging group regarding accessibility and video captioning, I decided to see how difficult it would be to add captions to an existing movie clip. I used an old clip that Andrew Baron and I created before he started Rocketboom. Its a little strange to use this clip for captioning though, since the audio and video tracks purposely don't sync up.
While there are many expensive, high-end tools for captioning video, there seem to be few examples of free software to do the job... until Michael Verdi recommended MAGpie, a free, cross-platform, java-based application.
I decided to give it a try. Its a little buggy, but what do you want for free? My biggest annoyance was that video playback was rather tempermental. I often had to stop and restart the clip from the beginning after each edit I made to the caption text.
MAGpie basically creats a SMIL file. However, it did not correctly format SMIL for Quicktime. Once I exported the project file, I had to open it in BBEdit to change a few things. Specifically, I added "SMILtext" to the top of the document, changed the file extension from .smil to .mov, and edited the src attributes so they would be absolute links to my Quictkime movie and QT text track once I uploaded everything to my webserver.
In total, this took roughly 2 hours to add captions to approximately 2 minutes of video.
Posted by jkinberg at March 25, 2005 12:29 AM
Comments
Like the video. I blogged the conversation in detail here:
http://www.herecomespod.org.uk/vlog/arc20050320.htm#BlogID216
Posted by: Julian Doncaster at March 25, 2005 8:56 AM
I am the Founder of 
