Closed Captioning

I did not find the process of adding closed captions to a Captivate 9 project very intuitive, but I have figured out some of the steps and thought I would post them here.

In my use case, I wrote a script and then had a voice-over artist record the script.  I then built my project by importing each section of narration into a specific captivate slide.

Later, my client requested that I add and enable closed captioning.  Since I had the script already written which matched the recorded audio, I thought this would be fairly easy, but it took me a while to figure out how to do it.  Here are the steps I followed.

1.  with a Captivate slide displayed, be sure that the TIMELINE panel is displayed.  You can do this by double-clicking the TIMELINE bar at the very bottom of the screen (double-clicking opens and closes the panel) and dragging the top of the TIMELINE panel up or down to display all the objects.  The recorded audio will be displayed at the very bottom of the panel, so scroll down if you don't see it.

2.  Open the Audio editor panel by double clicking the audio track.  (Again, this is the bar with the wave form displayed at the bottom of the list of objects on your slide.)

3. Towards the top of the audio editor window, choose the tab that says "Closed Captioning."  The window opens, by default, with the "Edit" tab displayed.  The tab text is gray on a gray bar and is not that obvious unless you know where to look.

4.  Click somewhere on the wave form / audio track where there is recorded sound.  You can't do the next step if the red play head line is positioned over silence.

5.  Click the PLUS sign below the wave form panel to display the first row of closed caption text. By default, the text entry box will read "Enter the Closed Caption Text."  It is selected text so you can either start typing, or if you have the script already typed out somewhere else, you can copy and paste it.  This is what I did.  (I believe there is a way to convert PP notes to Captivate slide notes and then convert that to closed captions, but I could not figure this out.  What I have is the non-elegant but workable solution.)

6.  When you click the PLUS sign, a yellow play head marker appears over the red line.  This is a key feature, and one I had to discover by trial and error.  The yellow play head bar marks the beginning of the closed caption line.  Select the caption text you just entered by clicking directly about the caption text on the row number (with one row, there is a number "1") or on the start time or end time value that is displayed.  Now, drag the yellow play head bar forward and backward, and you will see the Start Time for that caption line increment or decrement accordingly.  This is how you change the START TIME for any closed caption line.  You can't directly change the END TIME.  (Took me a while to figure this out, but I am slow...)  If you just have one row of text, it will display to the end of the audio.  If you add a second or third row (line of caption text), you select that line, drag the yellow paly bar to set the START TIME for that row, and it will adjust the END TIME of the row directly above to match.  So, row 1 will display, then stop displaying when row 2 starts displaying.  It is all in how you position the yellow play head marker, row by row, with each row selected as you drag the yellow bar.  Selecting the audio by dragging the RED marker does not do anything at all to the start or end times of any caption line.

7.  To select the font family, font size and font color (as well as the color of the background bar and number of lines of text wrap) for the displayed closed caption, open the CC Project Settings panel by clicking the button way over on the right edge of the audio editor panel.  Any settings that you adjust here apply to the whole project, not just the particular slide you are editing.  And, the "lines" value is NOT the number of rows you can add - you can add many rows if you need to - but it controls the number of lines displayed for each row, in case the text needs to wrap to fit on the screen.  The default is 3.  I did not mess with it, but I did increase the font size, changed the color and made it a sans-serif font.

8.  Last, you need to be sure that the CC option is turned on in your skin editor.  Otherwise, there won't be a button for viewers to toggle to see or hide the closed captions.  That option is way up in the top menu bar under Project >> Skin Editor.  There is a check box to enable closed captions on the play bar when the movie is played.

I hope this helps somebody.  it would have saved me an hour or more of time if I had found something like this today, but I didn't:)