Video Paper Builder - Caption Wizard

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IMPORTANT NOTICE - There are several major issues with VideoPaper Builder. View our Known Issues page for descriptions of the issues and work-arounds.

Using the Caption Wizard

Click here to download an .avi movie of Using the Caption Wizard. The movie shows how to creat and edit captions. The movie is approximately 10mb.

The right column of the VideoPaper Builder Interface contains a CAPTIONS tab; clicking on this tab button opens the Caption Organizer and displays a list of imported transcript files. Double-click on a CAPTION title to open the selected transcript file in the Caption Wizard. If no caption files are listed, or to create a new transcript file, click on the NEW CAPTION icon to add a blank Untitled Caption to the list and to open the Caption Wizard.

Working with the Caption Wizard

The Caption Wizard is used to edit individual utterances (lines of transcript text) and to timecode each utterance (attach a start time to each line of transcript). The Caption Wizard contains four general areas.

At the top left of the Wizard is a space where the Video file appears, with the same Time Display and Movie Controller as in the main software Interface. Time is displayed in the format

hour:minute:second:frame

The Current Time of the Movie Controller slider is displayed on the left and the Selected Segment Start and End times are displayed to the right.

Below the video is a box containing Speaker information: a color selector box and an area to type the Speaker Name. Click on the box and choose a color from the palette. The default color is Yellow. This will be the Speaker Name and text color used for this transcript file. Authors may wish to use a different text color for each Speaker. Be sure to choose a color which will show up on the Captions background color; the default setting for this is black. To change the CAPTIONS BACKGROUND color, see VIDEOPAPER SETTINGS: Layout.

Below the Speaker information is an area containing secondary Play/Rewind/Fast Forward buttons. This secondary set of Play/Rewind/Fast Forward buttons have exactly the same functions as the buttons located in the area between the video and the Time Display. They are repeated here to lessen ‘mouse’ movement time. Below these secondary control buttons is located a second Movie Controller. This Movie Controller has the same function as that located in the area between the video and the Time Display, but is more sensitive to the movement of the slider. By using these tools in combination, authors may navigate to general times as well as to specific frames along the movie timeline.

This area also contains a MARK CURRENT LINE button. When the author has navigated to the desired movie time, this button is used to add that exact movie time to the active utterance in the list. This is called TIMECODING the utterance.

To the right is an area which hs the imported list of utterances to be TIMECODED, or if no files have been imported, a blank area to create lines of transcript.

Utterances appear in this list as a table, with each utterance line in a separate cell, numbered in order and assigned a TIMECODE (default: 00:00:00:00). Clicking on a numbered cell activates the line, highlighting it in blue. The cells on the right are synched to the video on the left; clicking on each cell (if timecodes have been assigned) will change the frame of the video currently being displayed.

Individual caption lines can be edited within the caption editor.

Double-click on the individual caption cell to open the EDIT CAPTION dialog box, containing the caption timecode and text, both of which are editable, or Ctrl-click (Right-click) on the selected caption cell to bring up its context menu, which contains options to:

Insert Above – this will insert a new blank caption cell with a default setting of 0:00 above the currently active caption
Insert Below – this will insert a new blank caption cell with a default setting of 0:00 below the currently active caption
Mark Time – this will assign a timecode using the currently displayed frame of the video
Clear Time – this will return the timecode to a default setting of 0:00
Edit – this will bring up the EDIT CAPTION dialog box, containing the editable caption timecode and text
Delete – this will delete the text of the caption and clear the timecode (return to a default setting of 0:00)
Images: SS of Caption Wizard line context menu and caption line edit dialog box
Caption lines within the same file cannot be TIMECODED out of sequence, or have the same TIMECODE. An ERROR icon will appear in the caption cell if this has occurred.

Captions can be added, edited, or deleted at any time while working on the VideoPaper project.

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Last Update: 07/15/2005 Maintainer: VPB Webmaster (webmaster@concord.org)