How to Make Subtitles for your Videos

direct link: Painting of Vision Trees

This is the video I subtitled. Press Play, and then click on CC that appears below the video until it goes red. Let the mouse hover over the CC and a menu will appear that gives you access to "Translate Captions." Click on the first one, Africaans, and a drop-down menu will open and you can scroll down to choose another language. Google Translate automatically translates the captions into the language you chose, albiet mechanically, and not always accurately, but for someone who doesn't speak English but would like to know what is being generally said, what a wonderful option to offer. I am totally chuffed. Way to go, Google!

How did I subtitle it? Read on!

It required hours searching via Google, reading instructions and watching a few tutorials on subtitling. This article was most helpful: Adding and Editing captions / subtitles at Google Help Center. My blog post explains, as best I can, what I did, and I am writing it so that if you wish to subtitle your videos, you will have a better idea of how than I did.

My video is 8 minutes long. And, man, did I talk fast -meaning cram a lot in. Last night I subtitled about a minute and a half using a text editor while watching the video on my desktop but wasn't able to copy the time codes directly and found entering each one manually not just onerous but I made too many mistakes. It also took hours. I had to find an easier way.

This video by rewboss was helpful. I used the Third Party APP, CaptionTube, recommended in this instructional video on creating captions.



YouTube offers translation of captions/subtitles, albiet mechanically, in 25 languages, Hindi among them. It is definitely worthwhile to spend some time subtitling your video so that it's more accessible for people around the world. Google is making the world smaller by enabling us to communicate globally. I ♡Google.

Once you have given CaptionTube permission to access your YouTube videos, you can open your video in CaptionTube. Below is a screenshot of what the CaptionTube interface looks like. You play your video, listen, start a Caption at the beginning of each phrase or sentence, type it in, decide how much time it takes, and save the Caption. Then you play it again to make sure it more-or-less fits where the words are, and how long they take to be spoken. It takes some time at first, but you get better at figuring out how much time to give for phrases, clauses or sentences. Too many words fills up the screen and makes it 'too busy.' You want to achieve the best balance you can.

My video was a challenge because I spoke so fast and said so much. Most videos won't be as full of speaking as my painting of my vision trees was. I had a story to tell, and at 8 minutes, it was a bit long. Because I rushed through much of what I had to say, for a 'non-English speaking' viewer, understanding it proved challenging. I was asked a few times in different postings of it if I could offer the text by people whose native language was Urdu, or Punjabi, or Hindi, or French, or Spanish. Some of what I related had been posted in my blog and then included in an unfinished manuscript some years ago, so that was easy to post in the comments at Facebook or other sites on request, but in at least half of Vision Trees I was speaking off the cuff. I had no text. Last night and this morning I generated text from the verbal track by creating subtitles, which make me, honestly, very happy.

I bookmarked the CaptionTube subtitle file I was working on for my Vision Trees video and was able to re-enter the track where I left off. This helped since making subtitles out of densely crammed spoken text requires breaks now and then. Oh, and I needed to sleep for a night, too.


(click on images for larger size)

After you finish subtitling your video with CaptionTube, and you click on Publish, you are offered a few options. I chose to download the file as a subtitle file, an .srt file.

On my desktop, I opened the .srt file in a text editor and saw what you see in the screen capture above. I opened the video in VLC, but you could use any video player, and loaded the subtitle file, and watched the video with the subtitles I had made, making corrections to the subtitle file in the text editor. Sometimes subtitles overlapped because I hadn't given enough time between them, and there were some repetitions, so I corrected that in the text editor. Then I re-saved the file as an .srt file and uploaded that to my video at YouTube.

To add a subtitle file, open your "Videos" in the drop-down menu under your account name. Beside each video you will see a downward arrow; click on that, and a menu opens, and you see 'Captions and Subtitles,' open it, and you are given the option to upload a subtitle file. You can upload more than one subtitle file, if you have different languages. Google will offer these files to viewers of your video. So, for instance, you can upload a subtitle track in English, and one, if you are bilingual or a polyglot, in Spanish, or French, or Urdu, or whatever languages you like. The subtitle/captions option is fantastic, and Google can also offer mechanical translations in 25 languages. How cool is that?

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The music in Painting of Vision Trees is by Pierre-Marie Coedes, 'City night hubbub (instrumental)' from his album, "Lapses of Time." Pierre-Marie's music is a complex, sensitive interweaving of instruments and rhythms, and while eminently listenable, reveals riches on closer listening. Do check out his oeuvre at Jamendo.

If you're interested in the process of the painting, including a little photo of my set-up videoing it, I talk about it here: http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2011/06/vision-trees.html.

                              

Poetry Recording with Music: La Luna

Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix; background music, zero-project, 'Forest of the unicorns,' from their album on Jamendo, Fairytale.

My very first 'found' poem ever! However, the lines are all mine. A poem I composed from lines found in three of my tightly written, packed journals from 1980. I may or may not make a video poem, but if I do, having made a recording will help.

La Luna

Razors of lightning press my eyelids.
Your white love, the pearl shell seas.
The sky peels back like a scroll.
You are mine, unsplitted, fleshless.

Cornucopias, hot-bed undersea growths of things
joined to other things in sections, in shell lines.

Mad shadows. My blood is full of alcohol.

Memory is internally roused, without evasion.

I open the door to your shadowed face, dark hair, beard-
those fluid sea-algae, jade-green eyes.
Do they absorb or reflect light?

Light is a tumbling ball.
The moon is a lunatic.
There is a lady on the telegraph pole.

Each man or woman who enters has to leave
their personality behind like tossed clothes.

Pastel lightning crosses the sky.
The moon is a fetish.
A fat, marshmallow moon.
The moon contemplates itself,
a blood moon.

Words are a wash of waves;
waves of a ceaseless alphabet.

My throat is a silent, howling hyena;
the illness of passion.

I've been caught.

Where is the land; where is the vessel?

Lapped wind and frothed cloud;
mutant moon
- a glowing field of electrical fabric -

Vision is dangerous.

This fragile moon letter of white light.

The white imagination that you have to travel
through the prism to get to.

When I'm in love I'm outside of what
I'm inside of the rest of the time.


I follow the moon
am nothing but motion
...............following
streets marked by lights
as round as moons

am nothing
but shadows of light

as the moonlight
careens drunkenly in the sky

shrouds hide me
while the moon dances

a hallucinated ball

of white wind

shorn of darkness
dance naked night
my eyes flutter
in the tops of trees

spirits gather and flee

you have gone

                              

Zoned out, beading...

Where did the early night go? I'm still beading. Mantra beads, counters. Though when do I seriously meditate by counting mantra anymore? It's because I bought some lovely pink silk beading thread and am finally fixing a rose quartz necklace that broke on the street last year. Really I'm zoning out after finishing and posting another video poem, I'll call it a poem because it's about an image that carries the weight of the speaking, music and footage. Is it because I am such a private person that these videos knock me out? I wait like a worried mother hen when they're uploading, and then the deafening silence. Ah, video poetry, a fairly new and difficult form for most people. Most people prefer to read their poetry on the page. Poetry is dense and difficult and composed of compressed language and it is hard to follow a poem in a few minutes of a video, but what else are poetry readings? I've explored many ways of presenting a verbal accompaniment to visual footage. This one was a voice memo after a yoga set, still flat on my back, that I had intended to turn into a prose poem. But, hey, it wasn't 'a reading' -which is fraught with difficulties anyway, how to be the words that you speak, what do you dramatize and how, and all those questions. Ok, I'll post the video I'm talking about in this post - it's about "the wall," an image for many things, and likely we all have a "wall" of some sort in our lives. The video is a little dark, though. But I really enjoyed making it, with the storm footage, and the lights, and even found the camera shake, the hand-held quality, worked. Like brushstrokes in a painting, I guess. I sit here, tying knots between each large pink quartz crystal bead and each tiny pink white pearl, knots that will ensure if the necklace breaks, as it will, as they all do eventually, the beads won't fall over the road again. :)

The sound track is a midi file of the text that I generated at http://www.p22.com/musicfont/ and yes, I used copters, and gunshot, and a pad4choir from the music text generator (I did have to copy the sound files from the site one by one and mix them later) and ethereal sunrise, smooth clav, whirly, and nature sounds from GarageBand, plus the original track of thunder and lightning, so it is meant to be a bit, well a bit of a war zone. It works, but it's not for relaxation, obviously!

Back to quietly beading now.... :)

The video, The Wall:




(it looks better big, though, so go for fullscreen)