HowTo: 6 Ways of Captioning Youtube Videos Part 1

There are 6 different ways of captioning, ranging from simple to difficult. Although the Long way is hard, it captions the video a lot better than the simple way. Also, although the simple way is easy, the captioning fails. Here is an overview on the quality of the captioning service from simple to hard.

• On the fly Captioning=Simple and Fast but Caption Fail.
• Request Process for Machine Transcription=Simple but long. Even though it does better caption but still fails.
• Typing out the script and Youtube to add in the timing. Long but pretty good captioning but can Still fail if audio is bad.
• Online sites/programs to help you add in caption and set timing in a simple GUI, but it is long but not hard.
• Manually write out script and set timing by hand, but it is long and hard but best caption.
• Paying a service to do the captioning. Accurate but costly.

On the fly captioning is using Google’s service to caption the videos to English only currently. This was just recently added in for everyone on Youtube recently. Although it is simple, its captioning does not work well and usually the captions are wrong.  All it required to do is to click on the Closed Captioning button (CC button on the more [^] section on the Youtube video) and the button to transcribe the audio. Although it is a pretty cool service and it is sometime works well, it is more of a fun thing to watch how it captions things wrong.

The second option is also to let Google service to transcribe the audio to English only. This option is a little bit better, but is still a fail. This option takes longer (about a few days depending on how long it is and how well the audio is). This will require you to own the video and have the video on your Youtube account. Go to your my videos, go to the video you want, click on the caption button, and when you go into the captioning page, click on the “Request Processing (English Only)”. This service is a little bit better than on the fly transcribing, but can still fail.

Nest week, we will get our hands a little dirty and typing out the script.