Captioning Videos with Camtasia PART 2

The second option for doing the captions is by using the MANUAL button.
The first thing to do in this option is also pasting the transcription, but now we are
going to use the player buttons rather than the start and stop buttons on the open captions
window. In the moment that the transcription is pasted,
the first caption point is created automatically. This time, you have to play the video with
the video buttons; you can see that the first three lines of the transcript are displayed
under the video. When you hear that the text that is being displayed is over, pause the
video and focus the cursor in the line where you want the new caption point to appear,
click on the Manual button to make the new caption point, and start the video again,
you must hear now what you have written in the caption that is being displayed in the
video. You must keep on doing this until the end of the video.
We have two more buttons in the open captions window,
and they are OVERLAY and DISPLAY. With them we can select where do we want the
captions to appear, but if we don’t turn on the overlay button, the captions for default
are going to be display under the video.
If we turn it on, they are going to be display overlay in the video.
The function of the DISPLAY button is to give us the chance to decide if we want to produce
the video with or without captions. If we leave the DISPLAY button on, the video is
going to be produce with captions, but if we turn it off, the video will be produce
without them. When a caption is not well synchronized, it
can be fixed by giving a right click on the blue dot of the caption point on the open
captions window, delete the caption point only, focus the cursor on the previous caption
point, start playing the video with the player buttons and pause it where the new caption
has to appear, click on the manual button to stamp it.
Another way of fixing it, is in the timeline, zoom in as much as you can using the zoom
tool, play the video and pause it in the new point where you want the caption to start
appearing. Look to the number that is displayed under the player, and write it down. Select
the caption point and drag it to the correct place, that is the number where the video
was paused, as you can notice, the number changes along with the caption point.
After finishing, click on the finish button to go back to the Camtasia’s workspace.
Everything’s ready now to produce the video and for doing it I’m going to go to the
task list and under PRODUCE, I’m going to click on the link PRODUCE VIDEO AS.. In the
new dialog box that appears, go and click in the arrow, to see the different options
that Camtasia has for producing it. You don’t have to have a great knowledge about video
formats, because the options that Camtasia gives to its users to select from is by where
is the video going to be played, on an ipod? Or does it want it for the web or blog? Or
maybe to save it on a CD, it has some others that you can look at later.
I’m going to produce it as a CD. Camtasia creates a folder with the same name that you
give to the video. Here you can see the inside of the CD production, it has a single *.wmv
file. Now, I’m going to produce it as web . When
looking inside the folder, we can see that things are very different than when producing
it as CD, rather than having just a single file, we have 7. Why is this? Because the
video was produced as an embedded video. This means that the video and the player where
the video is going to be seen are produce at the same time. From the 7 files, 5 are
for the player, one is the video that in this case is an Mp4 and the last one is the html
where the video and the player merge. These two different kinds of production impact
also in the kind of captions that we want to have. There are 2 different options, open/close.
Open captions can be position under or overlay, and they are going to be display all the time
in the video. Close captions, have always to be overlay,
but the user has the option to turn them on or off by giving just one click in the cc
button that is located on the bottom left hand side of the player.
If you have a little knowledge of video formats, you can go and select custom production to
customize your production.