Ithaca College Teaching and Learning with Technology is happy to add captioning to all of our content in the campus media system. Captions are a great way to provide more accessible content to a wider audience and also increases our ability to search and find the videos in a new and effective way.
By default, we have started to use auto captioning on all media uploaded to the system. This is similar to what YouTube does. Auto captioning is made through computer generated means and attempts to perform a "speech-to-text" automatic caption of the audio that exists on the media file. Since this technology is not perfect, you should only expect that this type of captioning can get you approximately 70% accuracy. While 70% seems like a low number, it does give you a really good start to then edit the remaining 30% of the captions through the provided editing tool.
Click this link to view the video tutorial for Editing Auto Captions.
Navigate to the video you want to edit. Under the video player, click the Actions menu and select +Caption Requests. This will show you all the caption requests for the selected media. If you do not see any captions listed then either there are no captions, or you might need to click the "Refresh List" link to refresh the browser and show you the caption details.
In this list you can see some of the details about the caption that was created. Under the Status area there is an Edit button. Click the Edit button to open the caption editing tools for your video.
Note: It's important to note that these buttons are located in the same places whether you are in Canvas or media.ithaca.edu. They might look slightly different, but no matter where you are, the functionality is exactly the same.
A new tab in your browser will open showing the caption tools. The left-hand side of the page shows you the text that is listed from top to bottom for the entire video. Each rounded box shows you the breaks in the captions that appear on the screen. You can scroll through this list to quickly access the captions that you want to edit. Click the group of text that you want to edit and the text will show in the middle yellow text area for editing.
Most users will find that the yellow text box is the most useful and easiest way to edit your captions. The video will automatically play and display the text that is timed with the audio. Once you start to click and edit the type in this box, you will notice that the video pauses and waits for you to stop. Once you stop, the video will resume playing. This makes it easier to keep up with making changes and allows you to control the pace of your work. The Settings tab to the right of the screen is where you can change the amount of time the tool pauses.
The middle of the screen also shows you the actual video that you are working on. There are controls for playback just below that, as well as the ability to set timings and assign names of people speaking if you want to do that. You can even assign shortcut keys for speakers that you enter into the caption to save time. You can do this by click the tab called Speakers and assigning them that way. There are also some pre-assigned Hotkeys that you can use which are handy. Please review these optional features and feel free to use them as you see fit.
Once you are done editing and are happy with your changes, click the Save button. When you are ready to finally approve all your work you will need to click the Approve button. That will finalize your work and send it back to the caption company so that your captions will take effect and also produce a transcript file which can be found under the Attachments button once you return back to the player. It may take some time for your changes to appear here and you can confirm the latest version by checking the date under the "Uploaded At" column.
If you ever want to delete a caption file completely or upload your own file you can do that too. Select the Actions menu and click the Edit button. You will see a series of tabs appear. Click the Captions tab and you will see the captions that are available for your media. Here you can upload captions by clicking the "Upload captions file" button. The system accepts standard SRT or DFXP caption file formats. Clicking this presents you with a pop-up window that allows you to choose your file, set Language and Label details and then upload.
If you want to make changes to the existing caption file you have a few options under the Actions column here. The pen icon allows for simply editing the language and the label of the file, nothing more. When you are done editing you need to click the icon again which looks like a floppy disc icon. Click that and it changes back to the normal edit icon. The x icon is for deleting the file which is undoable. The last icon allows you download the caption file.