Hello and welcome to the Automatic Sync Technologies tutorial on captioning YouTube videos.

YouTube has recently announced native support for captioning, and you will be happy to know that AST already supports it.  You can generate caption files for your YouTube content from your AST account immediately.

There are basically two methods to add captions to your YouTube content:  Closed Captioning using the built-in support for captioning in the YouTube player, and Open Captioning, where you make the caption text part of the video itself.  You can use AST's CaptionSync system to produce caption output for either method.

CaptionSync is a web-based captioning service that allows you to submit your video content electronically and receive back caption files for just about any sort of media including YouTube, Windows Media, QuickTime, Flash, DVD authoring, podcasting, and many others.  CaptionSync is much faster, easier, and less expensive than traditional captioning, and it is ideal for captioning web media.

So, back to YouTube captioning.  The first, and simplest option is to use the native captioning support in YouTube.  When you upload your video to YouTube, you can provide a caption file with your video.  YouTube accepts the SRT format caption files, so you just need to select this output format when you make your submission to AST.  SRT files are available as either Broadcast output or Web ouptut.

First, upload your video to YouTube just as you normally would.  Then, log into the AST website and submit the same video to CaptionSync.  Click on the Advanced Settings button before you submit and make sure that you have selected the SRT caption output - this is what you will need for YouTube.  If you are using the "Web" application type, please ensure you set the line length to 32 characters - longer lines will wrap in YouTube and will not look nice.  If you use the Broadcast application type, then the line length is automatically restricted to 32 characters.  Now, go ahead and submit your file to get your caption results.

Now, let's add the captions.  On your YouTube account, locate your movie and click the "Edit" button.  Now, click the "Captions and Subtitles" tab.  Select your caption file - this is the SRT file that you got back from AST.  Give your caption track a name.  And indicate the language of your caption track.  Press the "Upload" button and you are done.  It will take a few moments to process, and then your captions will be ready for viewing.

Alternatively, you can choose to Open Caption your video.  In open captioning, you force the captions onto the video screen so that they are always visible, they become part of the video signal.  The advantage to this is that you don't require any captioning support by the player, so therefore these captions are inherently supported by all players that can display video ... including YouTube.  There are two disadvantages however.  The user cannot control the captions, turn them on or off, and the production process is slightly more complex.

To open caption a video, you generally start by close captioning it, and then export the video with the captions being displayed - rendering the captions right into the video stream.  There are many ways to do this - here is a summary of the steps to do it using QuickTime Pro.  You start by obtaining the caption file for your MOV file, that's the qt.txt caption track.  Then imbed this text track in your MOV file using QuickTime Pro, and scale and postion your captions where you want them on the screen.  You can find a tutorial on how to do this in the QuickTime section of our how-to videos at www.automaticsync.com/help.  Then, export the movie as a MP4 file - this will render the captions into the video stream.  Finally, upload the MP4 file to YouTube and you are done!

Ok, let's take a look.  There's our video.  And let's play it.  And there are the captions!

Good!
And here is an example of our open captioned video that I already put up on YouTube.


Ok, good.
Here are links to both the open captioned and the closed captioned versions of the captioned videos that we just demonstrated in this tutorial.  You can also find additional tutorials at www.automaticsync.com/help.