Thursday, February 19, 2015

Captions for screen-capture videos

I do a modest number of screen-capture videos for my classes and blogs, and keeping them short includes among its benefits easier captioning. I used to rely on the speech-to-text capability built in to the Camtasia Studio product, but over the past few videos I have come to rely more often on YouTube's option to transcribe and set timings. I still use Camtasia to record my desktop videos but then publish directly to YouTube from there and click on the button to edit captions. I like the keyboard commands to control playback while typing what I hear, and the fact that YouTube handles the timing makes it much smoother. One thing I often forget is to publish the captions I typed and to unpublish YouTube's automatic captions. I would not want any YouTube fame to come from being one of those "caption fail" videos. ;-)