Consider Captioning Short Videos Yourself
Faculty are not required to caption videos on their own. Other solutions are available. If you choose to caption on your own, here are some resources.
Short videos can be quickly captioned. You may be able to get quality captions in place faster than we can do it for you. The easiest way to caption your videos is to get a head start by using auto-generated captions.
Auto-Generating Captions and Captioning Interfaces
The following tools can be used to generate captions and/or use an interface to edit captions to be accurate.
Canvas Studio
Canvas Studio is an easy solution to caption a short video. You can:
- Access it right from Canvas
- Request that an auto-caption file be generated
- Use the caption editing interface to fix any issues
YouTube
This is an option if the video you want to caption is in your YouTube account or one that you have access to.
- YouTube also will generate an auto-caption file and provide a good interface for editing the captions.
- See a video tutorial on using YouTube to caption.
Amara.org
- Amara is a crowdsourcing site, meaning that you may find the video there that has been captioned by someone else.
- Amara provides an overlay over an embedded video so that you may add a caption file, and also provides an interface for fixing existing captions, such as the auto-generated captions from YouTube. The video needs to be able to be embedded in order to use Amara.
- See instructions on captioning with Amara.org.
Tech Connect Cloud (3C Media Solutions)
You can order captions from Tech Connect Cloud (previously known as 3C Media Solutions), and though you will not be able to edit the captions there, for very short videos, you can download the caption file, edit it in a simple editing program and then upload it back to Tech Connect. Note that previously, ordering captions via 3C Media Solutions would result in quality captions, now they will be auto-generated captions and should be checked for accuracy.
- Fill out the form found on the Edit page
- Come back a day or two later and an auto-caption file should be in place
- Download the caption file
- Open on WordPad (PC) or TextEdit (Mac) and you can edit the caption text easily. Do NOT edit the time code text.
- Save the file and upload back to Tech Connect
- Alternatively, you can upload the caption file to Studio or YouTube and edit the captions there.
