Captions

VidMus wrote on 6/16/2016, 12:50 PM
What is the best current software to create captions for online videos?

I need something that is low costs and reasonably accurate. My speech hearing is very poor so I need this for me as well as others. Currently I am doing Church videos and I never get to hear them. That is a drag! I can play them loud and hear the words but that will cause even more damage to my hearing.

My videos are long so I do not want to use an online solution.

I can use logic and some help to correct the errors.

My original audios are excellent quality.

I did a recent test with YouTube and it did an excellent job, missing very few words but YouTube does not auto-create captions for all of my videos. I need something I can count on.

Would also be nice to use the same caption file to create closed captioning for DVD's. My main goal is for online right now.

Comments

Former user wrote on 6/16/2016, 2:18 PM
Are you looking for a Speech Recognition type captioning or just software to transcribe and time your captions?
VidMus wrote on 6/16/2016, 2:50 PM
Speech Recognition type captioning because my speech hearing is way too poor for me to use transcription.
Former user wrote on 6/16/2016, 3:06 PM
Most captioning software that uses voice recognition is either online or very expensive. You might look into Dragon Naturally Speaking software. They have a home version that is relatively affordable. From that file you can create captions. I have not done it that way, but I know it has to be trained for the voice. But it may have some flexibility.

I have found youtube to vary. Sometimes it is right on and other times it is so far off, it is funny.
Guy S. wrote on 6/21/2016, 11:23 AM
<<...but YouTube does not auto-create captions for all of my videos.>>

YouTube will not even attempt to create captions for certain videos, or the captions created are unusable?

I've wrestled with the captioning issue myself and it's not a trivial problem. Dragon software is an interesting idea provided you're recording the same person and the person is willing to help train the software. Once you have the transcript in plain text format, YouTube will auto-sync it to the video. We did not find YouTube's auto-sync acceptable because of how it split up sentences, but it's likely just fine for your purposes. YouTube has a very nice facility for manually captioning video, but the process is time consuming.

The type of captioning file used for YouTube may or may not be compatible with your DVD authoring software. The last time I tried (about 18 months ago) YouTube's format was incompatible with Encore and DVD Studio Pro.

EDIT: I thought through this a bit more and I can only think of a few reasons why some videos are not being automatically captioned. A random glitch in YouTube, a speaker isn't speaking clearly, or the audio quality isn't sufficient. Here's what I would do:

I would render the audio portion with a low res solid white background. If I wasn't 1000% certain that the audio quality is perfect, I'd roll off the mid-bass starting at at 240Hz to reduce room reverb and cut everything below 100Hz to eliminate rumble. I'd upload that to YouTube and see if it can auto-create captions. If successful I'd download the caption file, upload it to the original video, and fix any errors.
Former user wrote on 6/21/2016, 12:22 PM
There are some programs that will convert the youtube captions into a more standard format.