Can anyone recommend software for adding captions to a video?

I mean, you can do it on iMovie HD, but it’ll take a while to do.

Sony Vegas.
The price is right, and we use it along with the CS4 Premiere, mostly for small projects.

iMovie, Adobe After Effects, Final Cut…

Just yesterday I recommended this site for alternatives for Premiere. Possibly one of them would work for you as well.

It seems like what you essentially want to do is add titles to the video, which just so happen to say what is being voiced in the film. Anything that has support for titles will do. All the better if it can place them over the film. Else, you’ll be achieving the silent film affect.

I guess my question would be whether or not you are looking for transcription software to go along with the ability to add captions. I haven’t used it like that, but you could see if there was a way to have Dragon Naturally Speaking transcribe an audio file.

I would second Sony’s Vegas Movie Studio if you have a few bucks to add the titles. Plus, it will make it easy to create an audio file if you are able to use transcription software.

I’ve seen software purely for adding line by line captions and with support for colour sets (depending on the type of descriptive) and character/person names. You could then watch the video, and click a button at the key points to advance captions.

It looked much easier to use than dragging in titles, sorting out the length to show the title, opening up the fonts palette… I was just wondering if anyone knew what I was talking about because this was years ago and I can’t remember the name. :(

Unless any of the movie editing stuff you guys have linked has something like this, it’s a lot of ‘faffing’. I’m adding captions to an hour and a half of footage, and they have to be descriptive for the deaf. Nevermind, I’ll keep hunting. I’ll probably end up contacting a specialist to do this for me.

Thanks for the input everyone.

rich – sndfreq probably knows the answer to your Q

Ooh good point. I’ll send a message.

Richard – check these
never had to add captions to more than a minute or two of footage at a time

Captions or subtitles?

A subtitle is just a plain text file (.SRT extension) with specific timecodes and the text underneath each time as a duration. Example:

92
01:13:21,376—> 01:13:23,867
Whilst you, no more than a brigand.

VLC can embed subtitles to an existing video file.

Captions; not subtitles unfortunately.

I’m assuming you know, but:

Subtitles are for people who don’t understand the language but can otherwise comprehend what’s going on by hearing audio cues and different voices.

Captions are for people who have no access to the audio, so the subtitles are colour coded depending on the speaker and descriptive information is added for audio cues (“door slams in the background”).

I’m catering for the latter on this project, and it’s a shame that it lacks the same support that general subtitling does. :( Thanks anyway Dave

Righto, I’m going to poney up the cash to have a local company do this for me. I simply can’t find an easy way to do this myself, and I could really be doing other parts of the work. Thanks for all your suggestions anyway everyone!

Yeah, some tasks just aren’t worth the time it would take to do it yourself.

Oh and interestingly, this company apparently uses internally developed private software.

sounds like a marketing opportunity if they have the capacity

I was thinking the same thing. Maybe in the current market they make more money doing it on a contract basis instead of distributing the software, though. I would imagine they do. They’re charging me £75 to do the whole thing, and provide multiple formats (hardcoded, transcript, broadcast format, and video overlay). Neat.

Oops, wrong price. edited

very cool

These are all Mac OS X apps, in order of sophistication/price:

http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/magpie/ MagPie (freeware/open source)

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13374 TitleLab (freeware)

http://www.synchrimedia.com/ MovCaptioner

http://www.zeitanker.com/content/tools/zeitanker_tools/zeitanker_annotation_edit/
Annotation Edit (has whole suite of tools incl. CC inscriber)

MovCaptioner the most straightforward, easiest to use; Annotation Edit is the pro choice and has export options for all the major formats.

Also on Windows side is Camtasia Studio (has a captioning/subtitling interface) at:

http://www.techsmith.com/learn/camtasia/5/editing/add-captions.asp#sync-text

(p.s. sorry for the delayed response-been busy with work!)...good luck

Heh, I’ll bear them in mind for the future. Thanks Jon!