Creating Accessible Movies with QuickTime Pro,
MovieCaptioner, MacSpeech Scribe (and YouTube)
by Tom DeMoulin
tom.demoulin@arapahoe.edu
303.797.5865
Photo by Raj Sen
Thanks for attending my session! Below are links to the content I used. Feel free to download what you need and use it as you see fit. My only request is that you credit me if you share these files with others.
eLCC_Making_Accessible_Movies.pdf (195 MB)
This is the PDF used throughout.
It contains all of the other movies, so if you want one item that plays everything, this is it. The only exception is that it does not include the demo movie I played at the start without sound, though it does include the same movie on the next page with sound. (Seemed like a waste of space.) In Acrobat, just click on each movie to watch it. The controller will appear at the bottom. Note that you'll need Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader in order to see the movies; Apple's Preview won't work. (QuickTime 7 or later may be required to watch these, as I didn't convert them to a native Adobe format when I placed them in the presentation.)
001.png (119 KB)
This is the screen shot from the website
I referenced inside the PDF. Even better, visit the website it was taken from:
http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.htm#(b)
The items below are provided in case you just want to review one or more individual tutorials. Note that QuickTime 7 is required to watch these. In a sad bit of irony, none of this content is currently captioned. I will endeavor to practice what I preach, using the workflow described in section 04.2 to replace these with captions over the next few weeks.
01demo_vid.mov (66 MB)
The video example requiring captioning. Not really necessary unless you need a sample to work from.
02qt_manual_transcription.mov (43 MB)
Video describing how to add captions using QuickTime Pro and a text editor. Here's a link to the PDF I credited in that section created by some other kind souls apparently from Oregon State.
03.1youtube_initial.mov (12 MB)
An introduction to YouTube's captioning features. The neat thing about YouTube is it can be a destination for captioning, but it can also be used as part of different workflows. This is the one free workflow of the mix, but life gets rougher if machine transcription fails.
03.5youtube_machineTrans.mov (1 MB)
Downloading YouTube's machine transcription as a starting point for captioning.
03.6myYouTubeTrans.mov (6 MB)
Final part of workflow above, showing the cleaned up transcript, which is uploaded back to YouTube for use.
03.7movieCaptioner.mov (18 MB)
Introduction to MovieCaptioner.
3.8MC-youtubeImport.mov (7 MB)
Importing a YouTube transcript into MovieCaptioner.
04.0macspeech_scribe.mov (19 MB)
Introduction to MacSpeech Scribe. I have to say that in this movie, I finish with a rather tepid endorsement of Scribe. This is due in part that I hadn't really taken the time to fully train it to recognize my voice. (You can provide it with previous text transcriptions to better train it to your voice pattern and vocabulary, which I have since done.) Also, at the time of this movie, I was not aware of the excellent workflow two items down, so making captions entailed a lot of copying and pasting, which (when combined with cleanup) took a similar amount of time as just typing in MovieCaptioner.
04.1scribeIntoMC.mov (8 MB)
Importing Scribe text files into MovieCaptioner. (I didn't cover this in the discussion, as it was minor compared to what comes next.)
04.2scribe-youtube-moviecaptioner.mov (15 MB)
This is the most promising workflow I've run across. As I mention in the movie, the holy grail of captioning is to not have to do it yourself. Make your movie, use QuickTime Pro to save the audio file, use Scribe to convert the audio into a transcript. Clean it as necessary and add punctuation, upload to movie and transcript to YouTube. YouTube adds the timecode and you can then deploy the captioned video in YouTube. Or download the timed transcript, import into MovieCaptioner, and deploy to any format MovieCaptioner supports, such as QuickTime, Flash, or even SCC captioning! (Note that YouTube's timing feature is listed as Beta, so some cleanup of the timed text file probably is necessary, but the timed saved is still immense!)
04.3flash.mov (14 MB)
I didn't get a chance to demo how to use MovieCaptioner to make an XML file Flash can use for captions. If you're comfortable using Flash (I don't cover the basics of importing video), this is a solution that might be useful. Writing these XML files by hand is a pain!