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Participant
August 10, 2010
Question

Best way to import closed captions

  • August 10, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 1400 views

BACKGROUND: We record "webinars" using Microsoft LiveMeeting. They are available for download as Windows Media Video (WMV) files. Our government agency-approved contractor provides captions embedded in the windows media video, and they also provide a RTF transcript. Captivate 4 & 5 only seem to support FLV or F4V videos, not WMV. So, I import the WMV video to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 to clean it up and edit it down. Then, I use the Media Encoder (version 5) to export a FLV video, which I will later import into a training module in Captivate 5.

However, when I edit the video in Premiere Pro, I can't seem to access those embedded captions. So, I use MAGpie (a free software application) to create captions using the existing transcript.

So, Captivate 4 & 5 have closed caption features, but there doesn't seem to be a way to import them from a text file, only to type them in one-by-one. That's fine when you have a 3 or 5 minute video, but when a professional transcription already exists, it would be much easier to just import all the text and then adjust the times.  I don't know if importing a caption file or text file with timcode is possible. I've tried to let Premiere Pro do it using the XMP Metadata transcription feature, but the audio quality in LiveMeeting isn't the best, and the transcription fails big time. It would be nice if Premiere Pro would allow you to import or edit captions too, but in CS4, it doesn't. If CS5 supports that I would consider upgrading; otherwise, it looks like back to manual entry. 

I tried entering captions (manually) into a project, and then exporting it and searching for the captions I entered -- hoping to find a hidden file where all the captions are stored, but nothing came up in my search. So, I'm guessing the captions we provide are exported directly to the SWF file, and unavailable?

At this point, I'm thinking out loud and basically soliciting ideas from folks who may have ideas on a better, more effiicient method to get captions in my projects without having to manually enter them again after we've already paid a professional captioning service to provide us the text file and time code. Thank you in advance for any ideas and thoughts. 

Cheers!

Jerry

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1 reply

Participant
February 27, 2017

You must have solved this by this time - 7 years or so.

Alan, professional at VerbatimIT.com