Hello and welcome to our tutorial on captioning content using Automatic Sync's CaptionSync service and your Panopto CourseCast system.  Panopto and Automatic Sync have partnered to provide a quick, inexpensive, and very easy to use captioning feature that you can access right from your CourseCast dashboard.

In order to use this feature, you will need to notify Panopto so that they can properly configure your system for CourseCast system captioning.  You will also need to establish a CaptionSync login ID.  You can do so by either contacting Panopto, or calling Automatic Sync directly at 877-278-7962.

Once Panopto has configured your CourseCast system to enable the captioning feature, you will want to log in to your CaptionSync account to do some basic configuration.  You only need to do this configuration once, but you will want to keep your CaptionSync login information handy as you can use your login to track previous usage, access alternate result types, or request "redos" if you want to alter previous caption results. 

Okay, we're now going to log in to your CaptionSync account; let's go to the AST web page -- here's the AST homepage and click the login button in the upper right hand corner to log in to your account. Use whatever Login ID that was given to you by AST.

Now, choose the application type of web. If you have multiple application types available make sure you choose web because the CourseCast system is considered a web application type. Now, choose the "Advanced Settings" button. Here you can set up the defaults for a variety of different characteristics of what you want your captions to look like, but the key one that we want to pay attention to here is we want to make sure that your chosen output includes the "DFXP Timed Text" files. So if it's not already on the left hand side, find it in this list on the right hand side and move it over to the left, so that it's one of the chosen outputs.  You may include other output types here and they will automatically get generated for each submission -- they will not get returned to your CourseCast system but they will be available to you for download from this site, or they can be automatically emailed to you as each job completes.  Now click the "Save as Default" and then the "Apply Changes" button. This will make sure that the DFXP output is getting sent back to your CourseCast system for each job that gets submitted. 

Ok, that is all that you need to do to set up your CaptionSync account to work with your CourseCast system.  While we are here though, let me point out to you the "Reports" link on the left hand nav.  This allows you access to all jobs that you have previously submitted.  From the Reports section, you may cancel jobs that have been submitted but not yet started, retrieve results from old jobs, or request a "redo" for jobs previously run.  See our help movies at www.automaticsync.com/help for more information on these functions.  If you request a "redo" on a previous job, the results will automatically update on your CourseCast system when the redo completes.

You can now log out of your CaptionSync account.

Okay, so now with that done let's go to your CourseCast system and log in to it.  We want to look at two different scenarios for captioning.  First, when you have a previously captured lecture and would like to request captioning for it.  And second, if you have a course series that you would just like to have automatically captioned as they are captured.

So, let's start with the first scenario.  To caption an existing lecture, simply navigate to the main "Courses" page.  Now, find the lecture you want to caption, and click the "Details" link for that particular lecture.  Scroll down to the Captions section, and then click the "Request Captions" button.  CourseCast will immediate send out a request for captioning; as soon as the results are complete you will see captions appear for this lecture.

Now let's look at the second scenario.  To caption all lectures for a given course, navigate back to the main "Courses" page.  This time, click the "Settings" link for the whole course (not an individual lecture).  Scroll down to the "Captioning Service" section and check the box requesting captions for all lectures for this course.  When this box is checked, all future lectures recorded for this course will automatically be sent for captioning as soon as the capture is completed and processed.  As soon as the caption results are completed, they will appear on subsequent playbacks automatically.  If the course has previously captured lectures that have not yet been captioned, they will also automatically be captioned once this box is checked.  If any of the previous lectures for this course have already been captioned, they will be skipped.

That is all there is to it!  Very simple; just like I promised!

Now, lets take a quick look at what the results look like.  Here is a sample lecture on the Panopto website that was captioned using the CaptionSync system in exactly the manner demonstrated here.  Go to the "Showcase" tab at www.panopto.com to find this lecture.  Once the player launches, you will see the video pane in the upper left corner.  Below that, click the "Captions" tab to see the captions highlighted as the video plays.  

The CourseCast player offers a couple of very cool features that are only available if your lecture is captioned.  First, notice that we can scrub through the caption text to see what the speaker is saying.  When we find something interesting, we can just click that caption and the presentation will automatically resume right at that point.  This allows viewers to quickly locate sections of interest and navigate there instantly.  
Second, the "Search" tab allows you to search the text of the lecture.  Select the "Captions" option and type in a word or phrase that you want to find in the lecture.  The player will instantly find all instances of the search phrase -- clicking on any one of them will bring you immediately to that point in the lecture.

As you can see, adding captions to your CourseCast lectures not only makes them accessible, but also adds some very cool search and navigation functionality to them.