New Captivate - Closed Captions

[LeighWD]

I may be asking too much from the new Adobe Captivate (once again).  I am building an interactive eLearning module for English Language Learners.  It involves text that they read, a few knowledge checks, a final assessment, and there is a video that they need to watch (a full episode - 24 minutes in length).  I desire both the playskin to be accessible (the embedded play/pause, mute, window expand, and playbar for fast forward and rewind) and for closed captioning to be an option. 

According to everyone, including Adobe Technical Support, event videos do not support closed captioning.  I need it to be an event video for the playback controls to be in the skin.  Has anyone figured out a work-around for this?  I tried to embed closed captioning within the MP4 file through Camtasia, to no avail.  I have also noticed that you can 'import' closed captions from the File menu.  Thought maybe I could do something with the original srt file, and toggle the Project.ClosedCaptions on/off depending on whether the student is looking at the episode/video slide or not.  Also not seeing any results.

Seems a little strange that this is so difficult.  Especially now that AI bots are generating real-time transcripts in video-conferencing platforms like Zoom.  Am I just daft?         

[Lilybiri]

Well, I had hoped that bookmarks in the New Captivate could help but No. Indeed, event video is playing independent from Captivate timeline.n Creating a Replay button is not a problem, having bookmarks for important parts of the video neither, same as in Captivate Classic.

Reason: you can only have static bookmarks, which are bookmarks generated on runtime by the user: Pause, Play. More info in this tutorial:

https://blog.lilybiri.com/bookmarking-in-captivate-classic-and-new-introduction

My example in New Captivate is waiting since a while for moderation in the eLearning community.                                                                                  

[Andrew Chemey]

@LeighWD ,

If you baked captions into the MP4 file, that could work. What do you mean "I tried to embed closed captioning within the MP4 file... to no avail"?

-Andrew

[Lilybiri]

@Andrew Chemey That is possible for slide video, maybe he meant that? It is not possible for event video because CC is linked to Captivate's timeline and event video plays independently.

[Andrew Chemey]

I mean to have a single MP4 file that includes captions "baked in" to the video. So captions are part of the video and not a separate file or entered into Captivate to display

[LeighWD]

Thanks @Andrew Chemey and @Lilybiri for the advice.  I would prefer to 'bake' closed-captioning into the MP4 file and continue to use the event video slide (over the multi-slide synchronized video option). 

Again, I'm new here to Captivate (and I'm solely using the new version) so I may have completely misunderstood things.  Even with the CC option within the Captivate timeline (for multi-slide synchronized video), you are pretty much manually entering CC into the timeline via Bookmarks.  This is a 24 minute video and I am building an English Language Learner course within Captivate that is 18 episodes long (each episode includes a different 24 min video).  My position would be entirely devoted to closed-captioning in this instance.  Ha!   

@Andrew Chemey, I thought that's what I did in Camtasia with my original MP4 file (baking, or as I put it 'embedding' CC within the file), however, that clearly did not work.  Any advice or guidance in this matter?  Is this maybe something I can easily do directly from YouTube?  Maybe I just don't understand Camtasia that well.  Or maybe I need to be using a different video editing program?    

[Lilybiri]

One of the feature requests since eons is to be able to import  SRT or VTT files which used by video applications like Premiere Pro and Premiere Rush. It may be better to look for such a dedicated app? Do you have access to Creative Cloud applications?

[LeighWD]

I do have access to Creative Cloud.  Both of these are Adobe video editing tools, correct?  Do they 'bake in'

 the closed-captioning, like we've been discussing in this thread?  Whatever 'editing' I do in Premiere Pro or Premiere Rush, I would need it to transfer to Adobe Captivate.

Just to be clear, I don't want to move away from Adobe Captivate.  I am building an entire eLearning course within it.  The episode video is just one part of the course.  There is a reading exercise, knowledge checks, and a final assessment.  All of these are learning modules that the students will complete.    

[Andrew Chemey]

Mary,

In all cases, I don't think any of us are recommending moving away from Captivate. However, I am suggesting you can use Adobe Premiere, for example, to bake the captions into the MP4 and then import that into Captivate. That way captions are displayed [for everyone]. 

Let me find a video and/or article that might help you; before I manually write up something (which I don't want to do, if I don't have to). It is relatively easy to generate captions in Premiere and then bake them in - before publishing the MP4 out

-Andrew

[LWDavidson]

Thank would be great Andrew!  Thank you so much.  I've never used Premiere or Pro (just Photoshop); it may be a steep learning curve for me.  I was not aware these programs had this capability.      

[Andrew Chemey]

I just did a basic web search and the link to this video provides everything you should need. It goes through:

1.  Creating captions from scratch (where you do not have an external SRT or VTT or captions file and want to generate them from the video itself). 
2.  Creating a side-car file (where the MP4 and captions SRT file are separate); OR
3.  Bake the captions into the video (7:57 minute mark)

If it is too confusing, feel free to reach out to me and I'll walk you through this

-Andrew

[LWDavidson]

Fabulous!  Thank you so much @Andrew Chemey.  I'll test this out when I get a moment. 

[LWDavidson]

It worked!  Finally!  Thank you so much @Andrew Chemey and @Lilybiri.  What a pleasant surprise to encounter a solution after sloshing through all of the puzzling idiosyncrasies that is Adobe Captivate.

[Lilybiri]

Congratulations. Since 2009I have pleaded to have a clear glossary for Captivate. In the New version they just change a lot of the terminology, is that the solution?

[Lilybiri]

A video is just an asset, just like an audio clip created with Audition, a bitmap image with Photoshop or a SVG with illustrator. Those are some of my 'server apps' to Captivate.  I prefer Premiere Rush because it is easier to handle (I am not a video expert) but I never created CC inside of the video so far.

[declare]

I wanted to respond to this post, as I've just found a workaround for introducing captions into a web (event) video slide in new captivate. You'll first need to add an audio file of silence to the slide with the same duration as the video. Freesound and other sites should have royalty-free silence available. You then use the closed captioning feature to caption the silence, either importing or inputting captions as you desire and have it play alongside the video in the timeline. I hope this helps others - I find the inability to either use YouTube captions through the embed codes or introduce your own very inaccessible.

[declare]

Never mind, this just creates an issue of the event video being out of sync with the timeline, as the time it takes to load is variable. Not a functional solution.

[RodWard]

As you have found, it's not really possible to predict to the split second when the video will download and be ready so that external Closed Caption text can appear in sync.

With event videos the only reliable way to make sure closed captions appear in sync with the video is to have them in the video itself.  Slide video is likely to be a better option because it is locked to the slide timeline. But even then the download times can cause the CC and video to be slightly out of sync.