Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Getting Granicus captions onto YouTube.

If you are captioning your live meetings and also using Granicus, you can put those captions on your YouTube page. You will need to download the .sami format captions from Granicus, then convert them to .srt format using the free Subtitle Workshop program, then upload to your YouTube page. This process was put together by Tom Loftus at SFGTV. The free Subtitle Workshop program is only available for Windows.

On Granicus: log into your account, go to the Archives tab, find your video and click to highlight it green. Click the "edit" button at the top of the window. When the new page loads for that video, click on the green "Captions" tab. You'll need to now scroll down slightly, so that you can see the radio button to choose Download. Click the "Go!" button.
You should have a windows pop-up and you'll choose to Save File and click "Okay." You should have a new file on your desktop called captions.sami with an unassociated file icon.

You can close Granicus and go to www.urusoft.net to download Subtitle Workshop. Under the Downloads tab, the current version is: Subtitle Workshop 4 BETA 4. Install the program and open it.

In SubWork, go to: File, Load Subtitle and open the .sami file from Granicus. It should open a spreadsheet with the IN/OUT times and single lines of captioning. If you click on any cell of caption text, it will appear in the bottom panel of SubWork. You can do text editing there, for spelling corrections or homonym mistakes.

Your SHOW/HIDE times are probably delayed by about four seconds, if you're using an off-site captioning service for your meeting coverage. Click in the first row of text. Now go to: Edit, Timings, Set Delay. A new window will pop up. You can choose to "+/-" your times by "HRS:MINS:SECS,milliseconds" but you probably want to change the SECS which are in front of the comma.

You should go to your YouTube video now and log in. Find the video you want to caption and click the Edit button. In the new window, there will be four tabs. Choose "Captions and Subtitles". In this window, find the correct time that you want the captioning to start.

Back in SubWork, you can now add or subtract a few seconds, select "For All the Subtitles" and Apply it. Don't worry about the milliseconds. Your captions will tend to float ahead or behind the actual speech, the same way that the captioning lag varies in real-time. You could go through and correct every line of your SubWork spreadsheet, but it will be extremely tedious for any spot longer than 60 seconds.

When you're done editing the text, go to: File, Save As... In the new pop-up, you'll need to scroll down to the SUBRIP (.srt) icon and double-click it. Rename and save the new file. You can close Subtitle Workshop.

On your YouTube Captions and Subtitles page, Browse for the .srt caption file you just made. You should probably name it "English" or "English subtitles available". Then select English in the Track Language drop-down. Upload the file. The caption option won't appear immediately, but should be available on your video in less than a minute. Go back to your main YouTube page to check it.

Single-line captions can be hard to read during playback. If you want double-line captions, you can open your .srt file again in Subtitle Workshop. Highlight two lines of text, then keystroke Ctrl+K (or navigate Edit, Subtitles, Combine Subtitles). You will have to do this for every two lines of text. An average video can have 200 line entries for ten minutes of speech. The repetitive process of selecting two lines and Ctrl+K (combining them) can be automated by using a free keystroke macro program like AutoHotkey.

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