In the caption editor you can upload a caption file for the video, or you can let technology do the work for you and automatically generate a caption file. Once the file is loaded, you can use the editing panel to:
- Change the text
- Change the segment’s start and end time
- Split a segment into two segments
- Delete a segment
General
You can access the caption editor by clicking on your desired video and then clicking on the Video editor button below the player. This takes you to the web editors and here you can click on the CC editor tab.
Caption files should be in WebVTT format. If you have caption files in other formats, such as SCC, TTML or TXT, you can easily convert to WebVTT format by using one of the many web editors out there in the internet. We prefer Subtitle Edit because it does almost anything with captions. Just upload the file and then click on Download, select the WebVTT (.vtt) file format and click on Save/Download.
If you have an existing caption file already uploaded and upload a new file, the old file will be replaced. If you don’t want to lose it, just click on the Download icon and save it locally before uploading the new file. Better safe than sorry!
The automatic captioning uses machine transcription of the audio track. It’s not perfect. The timing is generally spot on, but background noise, mumbling, people speaking at the same time and other factors reduce the accuracy of the output. With the help of the editor, you can clean up the most important parts of your captions.
Publishing Captions
Captions need to be published for them to be visible to the public. To do this, scroll to the bottom of the caption editor page and in the lower right corner you will see a blue button labeled Publish. Clicking on Publish will make the captions visible in the player and in the transcript panel on the public page.
If you need to hide the captions, just click on Unpublish and the captions will be hidden. You can edit captions in either state, Published or Unpublished.
Changing a caption segment’s text
Click on the caption segment that you want to edit. The text will appear in the edit box below the player. Inside the edit box you can make your changes and then click on Preview to see how they appear in the player. Click on Save to save the changes and move to the next segment. The chars/sec displayed above the edit box give you feedback on whether you have too much text for the duration of the segment.
Changing a segment’s start and stop time
Sometimes you’ll need to adjust the duration of the segment because you’ve moved words to another segment or the timing of not synched with the video. You can use the Start and End time fields to adjust the individual segment. You can only adjust until you bump into the previous or subsequent segment. If you need to slide all captions from a particular segment onward, then use the Shift caption timing feature.
Splitting a caption segment into two segments
If you have too much text on the screen, you will want to split the caption segment into two segments and then edit the text and timing. Select the segment that you want to split and click on the Split segment icon above the edit box. The segment will be duplicated, and the duration will be halved. Now you can make your edits. If you want to revert, just delete one of the segments and adjust the timing back to the original value (double the post-split value).
Deleting a caption segment
You may want to delete segments that contain background conversations or dialog that is not relevant to the video. Just click on the segment you want to delete and then click on the Delete icon below the player. The segment will be deleted and the surrounding segments will be unaffected.
