Captioning Flash Video with CaptionSync

Streaming video content over the web using Flash is gaining tremendous popularity, particularly in education and conferences.  This new medium allows viewers to attend a presentation without the inconvenience and cost of travel and can substantially reduce facilities costs for the content provider.

Captioned content fosters a better viewing experience, which in turn leads to higher adoption rates, better retention of the presented material, and higher user satisfaction.  Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) maintains a strong focus on captioning for web media, especially in educational settings, and can work with clients to develop fully automated solutions to caption and publish captioned web content.

Output to Flash

You can begin captioning your content by uploading your media and text file transcript through our web interface. Within minutes XML caption files are emailed back to you, ready to be referenced in the Flash captioning component and placed on your Flash Media Server or web server.

CaptionSync supports several methods of captioning Flash, including:

• Flash Captions for Flash CS3 or CS4 (DXFP output) (see tutorial here)
• Flash Captions for LongTail Videos’s (Jeroen Wijering’s) JW FLV Player (DFXP output — older versions use SRT) (see tutorial here)
• Flash Captions for Flowplayer (DFXP or SRT output)
• Flash Captions for NCAM’s free CCforFlash caption component (DXFP output)
• Flash Captions for RIT’s free Flash caption component (XML output)
• Flash Captions for Captionate (XML output)
• Flash Captions for HiCaption (QT.TXT output)

Benefits of Using CaptionSync:

Captioning also offers a number of additional benefits to all users that should not be overlooked:

• Compliance: ADA and Section 508 require captioning for most broadcast and distributed video content.  Webcasts fall under ADA regulations and are subject to these captioning requirements. If you are making a webcast publicly available, it should be captioned.
• Indexing and Searching: Because captioning involves the synchronization of text content with the audio/video material, it allows the content to become easily searchable with traditional text searches and used as source text for search engine ranking when embedded in a web page.
• Universal Access: You may design your content from the ground up to be used by a wider audience – special needs and ESL
• Improvied Comprehension: Captioning improves comprehension for all viewers, especially for those using English as a second language.

Advanced Features

Using a standard set of markup commands, producers can optionally “mark-up” the text transcript in order to control the exact format, location and content of the captions.  This feature allows producers to dictate the font, color, and positioning of any caption, as well as provide content to appear in the captions that is not found in the audio track (symbols, sound effect references).

Priced Right

CaptionSync is a web-based pay per use service so there’s no software to buy or install. Just choose which services you need (transcription and/or captioning) and pay for them online. Request a price sheet now.