Converting Your Text to Closed Captions

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Once you have a transcription of your audio, your work has just begun. Typically, your transcription will list each speaker and their comments in paragraph style, and may or may not have background noises, speech inflections, or other additions necessary to provide complete comprehension of the event.

As a starting point, your transcription may look like this:

     Ken: We're streaming today live with both the Real encoder and     the Microsoft Windows encoder, side by side.          Jan: Very politically correct.          Ken: That's another interesting thing. There's more and more of     the streaming codecs available, especially at this show. We just     talked with Apple about QuickTime, and there are several new     ones. We'll talk to those authors, tomorrow. 

Now the task is to add the required sound effects and format the text as specified in your style sheet. You should also look at the requirements of your captioning software. For example, MAGpie assumes that a single carriage return separates two lines within a single caption, while a double carriage return means a new caption.

If I input the text as shown in the sample transcript, MAGpie would produce three two-line captions, but the first and third would contain far too many characters. To avoid this, and remove the names (I'll show who's speaking by positioning the captions), I would pre-format the file as follows:

     We're streaming today live with both the Real encoder and the     Microsoft Windows encoder, side by side.          Very politically correct.          That's another interesting thing. (both laugh)          There's more and more of the streaming codecs available, especially     at this show.          We just talked with Apple about QuickTime, and there are several     new ones.          We'll talk to those authors, tomorrow. 

I also added the "( both laugh )" caption to reflect that both Ken and I were laughing after the "politically correct" quip. As we'll see, preformatting the file in this manner importing into MAGpie a snap. If you decide to try MAGpie, be sure to check out NCAM's page on preformatting documents for MAGpie http://ncam.wgbh.org/richmedia/tutorials/transcriptpreformat.html.

If you decide to use another captioning program, check the manual for preformatting tips for that product. Bear in mind, most captioning programs won't accept Word for Windows .DOC files, so save the file as a plain text file with a .TXT extension.

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    DV 101. A Hands-On Guide for Business, Government & Educators
    DV 101: A Hands-On Guide for Business, Government and Educators
    ISBN: 0321348974
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 110
    Authors: Jan Ozer

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