Captioning a video?

June 2, 2016 3:53 PM

I would love to upload a video to Amazon's Direct Video service

I have completed all the necessary steps, but the hangup is that they do not allow distribution of video without captioning.

The project is a small documentary I made many years ago and though I imagine there will be very few people that would ever watch it, I thought it would be fun to have it available on Amazon.

Is there any way to get this thirty minute video documentary captioned for free or for a very low sum?

Thanks

Henry

posted by silsurf to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

I was curious about captioning and a quick search gives a bunch of info, the biggest is the time element being about three hours of transcribing. Is there a script, that'll cut that down. And perhaps you would not need to be super accurate?
posted by sammyo at 6:41 PM on June 2, 2016

Are you looking for someone else to do the captioning, or for DIY tools? And are you looking for a .srt file that can be uploaded along with the video file (creating closed captions) or for hard-coded open captions that are always on-screen no matter who is watching?
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:56 PM on June 2, 2016

FWIW I have been able to use MeFi jobs for small transcribing projects and you could get something like this done for $50 or less unless there are strict formatting requirements.
posted by jessamyn at 7:19 PM on June 2, 2016

I've used rev.com and cielo24.com for work, both around $1 a minute. You'll get both captions and a transcript. In my experience the text is very accurate, even for niche/technical content.
posted by third word on a random page at 12:37 AM on June 3, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks all, sounds like rev.com might be perfect!
posted by silsurf at 7:14 AM on June 3, 2016

Response by poster: I used rev and the project was done in about 24 hours and cost $1 a minute. I am amazed to be honest, it is exactly what I was hoping for. Very surprised that I could not find it when I did my googling? Oh well, now I know. MeFi does it again!!
posted by silsurf at 7:40 PM on June 4, 2016 [1 favorite]