Tag Archives: captioning

Close Captioning Experiment (Sea Monkey War)

This is one of few scripted videos I’ve done, and it’s kinda a social commentary on war… with a twist.

We were actually reading our lines, which were taped behind the Sea Monkey container. The observant viewer will notice that the Sea Monkey container was devoid of brine shrimp. I had to shoot some b-roll of brine shrimp from a friend’s ecological glass dome (which unfortunately looked nothing like the inside of the Sea Monkey container.

‘ve been interested in close-captioning as a way to make my video accessible to those who can’t hear or those that don’t speak English. It will also be a major driver of search engines in the future.

Here’s my attempt of using Overstream to generate close-captioning, and now I’ll see if I can export them to YouTube –which supports a simple subtitle format that is compatible with the formats known as SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT).

It took about 20 minutes to generate these, and I would highly recommend viewing the brief tutorial on Overstream before you try it.

Thanks to Bill Creswell’s blog, I’ve also found TubeCaption.

Wow- I exported the .sub file from Overstream and uploaded the file to YouTube (in the “edit video” section). Instantly I have close captioning on YouTube! That was incredibly easy. Here’s the final result, but you have to activate CC on the bottom right corner. Keep in mind that only the video publisher can do this at YouTube (so you generous close caption volunteers will have to send the creator a .sub file… but I’m sure most YouTubers would be delighted to receive and post them).