What's that pig outdoors? Help me caption my story

October 28, 2008 7:04 PM

I'd like to add captions to my YouTube videos and preferably not do it by hand. YouTube recommends this software but I have a Mac. Is there something free or cheap I can use? Any other tips? Thanks.
posted by jessamyn to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Mov Captioner, from here, $25
posted by mrzarquon at 7:14 PM on October 28, 2008

This looks to involve the same amount of physical labor, but is free.
posted by bizwank at 9:35 PM on October 28, 2008

If you're quick, you can grab this and run some Windows apps on your Mac for free.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:55 PM on October 28, 2008

ScreenFlow 1.2

One of the mac sites I read just did a review of this, and he had demo clips up that do exactly what you're asking to do. It would allow you to do more than this as well.

$99, but seems to be the best of the bunch. Maybe overkill for what you want.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:34 AM on October 29, 2008

Alas, I am not quick but both of those tools look promising. Now if I can only figure out why the sound and video are slightly out of sync on the danged video I made [just a recording with imovie] I'll be golden. Thanks everyone.
posted by jessamyn at 7:35 AM on October 29, 2008

Sound and video are out of synch when played on your mac, or when uploaded to youtube? What are you playing them with? How are you exporting them? Do you have QT Pro?

I find that exporting them as full quality files and using QT Pro to do my final "mix down" works best for me, but I am pretty much a novice at this as well.

Google has an app for uploading videos. The developer reports this problem. I was looking for something like this (my question). I wanted to not have to use a browser, since it kept timing out on me.

Anyway, the google mac app: vidnik.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:41 AM on October 29, 2008

apparently the bad syncing is a known problem with imovie [played back on my mac and on youtube] so I may springfor QT pro. Really all I want to do is record a totally simple "me reading a story" video and then put it on YT with captions. I think I can do this. Thanks again for all your help.
posted by jessamyn at 9:47 AM on October 29, 2008

I wanted to do this with Time Cube, but was afraid of copyright issues (and keeping a straight face).

Follow up with a link to the video if that's allowed.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:31 AM on October 29, 2008

Here's the video that has the bad sync which I'd like to both 1. caption and 2. replace, probably not in that order.
posted by jessamyn at 11:31 AM on October 29, 2008

If you could figure out how much the sound is out of synch, and which way, you could extract the sound file, clip off a bit, and use the audio replace feature in Youtube.

I'd first just try uploading a different file format. Youtube takes like 90 different kinds.

Things should be easier.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:56 AM on October 29, 2008

sorry for the late update but this is now stupidly easy via captiontube.
posted by jessamyn at 6:07 PM on May 18