Over the last few weeks, I've been taking a look at how to caption video, and I have to admit, the process is still a bit daunting. Creating a transcript is time consuming, but taking that transcript and placing it appropriately into the video? You have to be really committed to keep that up. I didn't find the process to be particularly efficient, and I think that there has to be a better way to add captions. One that doesn't take so much time and isn't so mind-numbingly repetitive.

At first glance, it seemed like a software package would be required, and possibly some specialized hardware as well. Hardware? Yeah, I was surprised too. Not to mention the money. Somehow I don't think that a software package that costs more than your computer and all of its other software applications combined is something that is going to get past too many holders of the purse strings, at non-profits or for profits. I was beginning to see why most closed captioning is done to meet legal requirements and not to meet the needs of the user base.

Then I came across Automatic Sync Technologies. It is an online service that allows you to upload video or audio files and have captions added. If you provide a transcript the process takes as little as 5 minutes for an hour of video. Without a transcript the process takes a couple of days. It works with a variety of formats that work well for web video, including .WMV, .WMA, .MOV, .RM, .RA, .WAV, .MP3, .FLV, .M4A, .M4B, .M4V, or .MP4. They also do

Billing is $85 per media hour for non-profits if a transcript is provided, and is billed in 10 minute increments. So a single 5 to 10 minute podcast would cost about $15 if you provide the transcript. We've come to expect things for free on the web, but this seems to be a reasonable price. I'll take a look at the service and see if I can find other similar services and compare them for price, quality and speed.

I have been working on adding closed captions to videos on and off for a couple of weeks, and I found a post that talked about a video service I hadn't been aware of called Jumpcut. Yahoo! bought the service last year, so I was doubly surprised I hadn't heard of them. I guess
Yahoo! has had enough trouble without getting the word out that they have a video site along the lines of YouTube.

What's nice about Jumpcut is that it allows you to upload videos, just like all of the other video wannabes,  but then you can edit the video you've uploaded online. I decided to give it a try on this week's X-Interview with Acumen Fund Fellow Adrien Couton. Here are the results:



Okay, I'm not a professional captioner, but I think the end result isn't half bad, especially for a free service that didn't require me to install any software. There are other kinds of editing that you can do as well, that may make editing in a program like iMovie almost redundant. I was glad that they had a save link though, as editing video in a browser felt kind of precarious! Not that the site hiccuped at all, it just felt new.

Still, I do have a few less than positive thoughts about the process. While I was glad I could add the captions/subtitles, the process was very time consuming. Off line editors seemed to be a bit easier to use, including the cross-platform / Java app MagPie. MovCaptioner for Mac has the best interface I've come across so far. It plays a section of the movie over and over as you add the caption and then move to the next bit of video as you finish. Much faster than adding the text and then adjusting it's placement. Also, I don't see a way to export the added text to a .smil text file that caould be added to other services, like iTunes. Nor do I see immediately where I could download the movie to so that I could, again, share via iTunes.

Still, a very promising web app, and one that I'll be delving into more to see if it can fulfill it's potential for adding captions.

Lately it seems as though the tech world hasn't been keeping up with accessibility. It's easy to overlook accessibility issues when you're in a rush to get things out to market, and it seems that closed captions have been one of the casualties of the market. I recently sat in on a conference session that dealt with accessibility issues in the Web 2.0 space, and as aware that all the cool whiz-bang features AJAX and Web 2.0 methodologies bring us aren't always developed with everyone in mind. It's still a young market, and I'm glad to see efforts made to close the gap here. What I didn't realize was that closed captions had taken such a hit.

It's understandable with the explosion of video podcasts that not everyone is adding captions to their videos they make in their mother's basement. We haven't done so with the X-Interviews - yet - and really, a lot of people are just starting to get the hang of getting video on the web at all. What surprised me, however, was that HDTV shows and digital downloads were either missing captions or they were difficult to access. I don't know anything about HDTV standards, but it seemed to me like this was a ridiculous problem to have with a technology that was designed to allow more information to be included in the stream, not less.

The digital downloads were less surprising, but still - Quicktime has included closed captions since 7.2 and the iTunes store sells TV shows that have already been captioned. Seems to me that this is a no-brainer. Somebody at Apple must have thought so too, as the new version of iTunes with it's highly touted ringtone feature also includes support for closed captioning. My iPhone is perpetually set to vibrate, so there's little concern that people watching a movie with me will be interrupted by the Commodores "Brick House" if my partner calls me. For me, the closed captioning support is a much more relevant and welcome addition.

It is supported in podcasts as well, as you can see in this SpaceGeek podcast. It's also a nice way to take video shot in one language and make the content available to people who speak other languages.

Hopefully, Apple will update the listings soon to provide an easy way to tell if a video is closed captioned or not. Right now, I can't tell what is or isn't. I searched for closed captioning and came up with one season each of 24 and Stargate - but neither mentioned if they actually were closed captioned. Still, it's a step in the right direction. The new iPods are also supporting captions, though I haven't seen that myself as of yet.

I should also note that Google Video supports closed captions, and has a nice, visible marker denoting videos as such. It's great to see this start to happen, and it will be interesting to see how it progresses. Hopefully there will be some decent, inexpensive automatic captioning applications soon so that everybody can include them in their videos easily whether they are filming on a big Hollywood sound stage or in their mother's basement.

Revver and Brightcove and Blip, oh my!

So many video upload services and so few hours in the day. How to choose which one to upload your videos to? And why?

Along with the services mentioned above, you could also use Yahoo!, Google, MySpace, MetaCafe, and DailyMotion in order to share your videos. And, of course, who can forget the $1.6B behemoth of the business, streaming their users' videos to computer screens, AppleTVs and iPhones everywhere, YouTube. (There are more, of course, but for the purposes of today's discussion, we'll stick with these.) If you are looking to plop your videos onto your own page any one of them will do so, with varying degrees of quality and ease.

If you're want to share your videos with as many users as possible, you might choose YouTube for the size of its audience, and risk getting lost among the dancing on treadmills and the ubiquitous hand-holding otters. You might have a better chance of breaking through on one of the smaller, less used sites. But why should you settle for just one? Well, because uploading videos to 9 different sites is a long, drawn out bore.

Thankfully, there's a site with an answer to what ails you, or at least what has been ailing me. TubeMogul allows you to store your login information for nine different video sharing sites and submit your video to all of them at once.

This week's X-Interview is the first video I've tried this with, and if the results are good, I'll go back and upload the previous X-Interviews (All 35 of them! Yikes, it may take me a bit of time even nine sites at a time!).

It takes a bit of time, but I've been writing this while letting the uploads run their course over in another browser window. Let's see what the results look like. I'll skip YouTube since that's what we've been using for the X-Interviews for a while now.

Yahoo!:


MySpace:


MetaCafe:


Google:


Revver:


DailyMotion:


Blip:


Brightcove:
Still waiting.

Not a process for the impatient, that's for sure. Still, a much less odious task than uploading them all one by one to each site. It is interesting to note the differences between the services, how they handle widescreen video (or don't), what kind of controller is included and what initial image is displayed. A lot is a matter of taste, but load time is the most important thing. You would hate to have users try to play a video and leave because it takes too long to load.

Options for captions are also something to take into consideration. I worked on adding closed captions to a video over the weekend, and it was not as simple as I thought it would be. I noticed that Google Video has an option for captioning, and I've read that YouTube does as well. More on that later, as I learn more about how to make video more accessible.