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March 25, 2005
More fun with captions
After experimenting with captions yesterday using MAGpie, I decided to give it another go. But this time I used the exported files from MAGpie as a template to create caption text and a SMIL movie by hand in BBEdit. This proved to be relatively quick and easy. It was actually a little easier than using MAGpie becuase I could scrub around the clip with Quicktime player and roughly estimate the timecode points to mark the beginning of each caption segment.
I also realized that SMIL doesn't like it when you overlay a text region on top of a video region. It tends to distort the video in strange ways. This sucks because I wanted to keep the movie size at 320 x 240, but instead had to tack the text region onto the bottom making the height a non-standard 275 pixels.
Lastly, it seems MAGpie inserts quite a bit of unnecessary code in the caption file which I cleaned up by hand. In the previous video, the placement of the captions seemed to jump around a little bit, but in this movie the captions are consistently in the same spot.
In total, it took me about 30 minutes to create this SMIL movie and caption file based on the 30 second video I created previously.
Posted by jkinberg at March 25, 2005 4:19 PM
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