Ask Your Friends to Caption Their YouTube Videos
Wednesday August 6, 2008
...Because they really have no excuse for not doing so. Today Bill Creswell brought to our attention the existence of yet another means of captioning YouTube video: What else but a site called TubeCaption.
With so many options available now (TubeCaption just joined a growing list of options) it is a wonder there aren't more videos captioned on YouTube and in other places. Does captioning have an image problem? (for handicapped, too difficult, not attractive, interferes with enjoyment, etc.) What can we do to make captioning "cool" so that more hearing people will be willing to do it?
Related: Web Video Captioning
Comments
I’m so pleased with his blog and subtitled vlogs for all the deafies! I have honestly tried to get my vlogs subtitled, but it keeps grtting messed up. I try to make it more understandable when I write in English while I was using ASL. Or Should I write in ASL while talking in ASL? Please let me know. Thank you for sharing your concern. It’s a great post.
You can email me. My email addy is in my blog.
Thanks for link! I would pleased to tell
to my cousin or my step-mother to doing that
for that captioning on youtube videos.
Hello everyone and thanks for showing interests in TubeCaption.com
I’m Alex from TubeCaption. I’m one of the two founders of the site. I’ll try to address the concerns raised in the Post
“With so many options available now (TubeCaption just joined a growing list of options) it is a wonder there aren’t more videos captioned on YouTube and in other places. Does captioning have an image problem? (for handicapped, too difficult, not attractive, interferes with enjoyment, etc.) ”
Answer: YES. Captoining does have a problbme: Captioning is hard. Transcribing is an extremely demanding and painstaking task. I did caption a short clips and it took me literally 30 minutes (at least) to caption a 4-minute clip. Professionally, 1 minute of live videos will take 8 minutes of processing for the caption (I got this number from a website of a professional caption service). Currently the user interface of most online caption services is not convenient and flexible enough for serious captioning. Even with the new YouTube annotation feature, it is still very tedious to put on the captions for the videos.
At TubeCaption, we try to overcome the UI obstacle by implementing an easy-to-use and familiar interface (timeline-based) with powerful features, such as keyboard shortcuts, Undo, Batch Move, Import text with audo-duration detection), .SRT file support (coming soon). We want the tool to support the caption publishers, not working against them, making the process of captioning video easier, not harder.
What can we do to make captioning “cool” so that more hearing people will be willing to do it?
Answer: We implement a “revenue sharing” program for caption publishers, which we will split 50% of the AdSense revenue with the publisher. Since Google will also index the captions text, the ads on the site will be very targetted to the verbal content of the Video. We want to encourage people to caption for the benefit of the community, and also to make a good compensation for their work.
Since TubeCaption.com is relatively new, we would love to hear your feedbacks. We would be very glad if you can also help promote the service more.
Sincerely yours,
Alex Le
alexle@tubecaption.com
I’m really grateful that there is people working to caption YouTube Videos. It sure is hard work.
Hello Alex,
That was very nice of you to leave a comment here, and I am extremely impressed. I want to share that I understand the hardship of writing closed caption video, but closed captioned writers usually get formal training and can do real time caption so it is done immediately. For those without formal training, it can take a while. I just wrote an article about this recently on how to get formal training for this, but I thank you for sharing this.
I honestly never got into watching videos online, mainly because they are not closed captioned. According to statistics, most videos online are not viewable anyway. We have people who cannot use thier speakers (baby sleeping, at work, etc), don’t have speakers (or don’t give good sound quality if they do), hearing impaired, or use another language.
Thanks a million for this Jamie and Alex!
I just finished trying out tubecaption.com and was very impressed. Thank you for this great free service as well as the “open-ness” of the project. I know ideas and sites with this generous structure/framework can only improve over time
wish the best for tubecaption.com and for Jamie and Alex
glad i found this & proud to have an account
gracias,
sergio legorreta
DCMP has a great page for learning how to caption things yourself: www.dcmp.org/ciy.
Also, they have a really in-depth tutorial if you’re interested: www.dcmp.org/caai/nadh204.pdf
Mac users can create captions for their YouTube videos (and other formats) by usingMovCaptioner to create .SUB and .SRT files. MovCaptioner makes it go quickly because it keeps looping so many seconds at a time till you get it typed and when you hit the Return key, it goes on to the next few seconds. So it can go as fast as you can type, and it’s very easy to use. It will also create transcripts, do embedded QT captions, SAMI for Windows Media, and Flash captions for use with the CS3 caption component. Check it out. Cost for s/w is only $25. Go to http://www.synchrimedia.com to download the demo version.