Captioning and Weekly Update

This week was pretty chill (at least at work). Most of the week, I worked on my Canvasser. Photoshop has been kind of tricky to use because grouping layers complicates the process of moving assets around, so I probably just shouldn’t have grouped them that early. Right now, I am working on making the edits Abriella suggested to the windows.

I also figured I would talk about the e316m captioning project Ingrid, Bridget, and I have been helping out with. Every three weeks, we will rotate who does captioning for the week.

We start by downloading the mp4 file for the week, then uploading it to the automated captioning service. It will work on the subtitling job for a while, then you will be able to download an SRT file of subtitles. These subtitles are generally pretty close to the real thing, but have a lot of little typos. For example, the word “to,” is commonly written as “thio,” and there are often weird capitalizations and spaces.

Therefore, to correct these subtitles, we upload them to the subtitle editor in Amara. It is pretty easy to use and learn, it’s just that making edits takes quite a bit of time when you are constantly pausing and restarting. I am at the mercy of my internet speed any time I do the captioning. When you finish captioning, then you will download a VTT file and upload the edited subtitles back to the video editor. I have one more week of captioning right before Thanksgiving, but yeah, it has been interesting to learn all the captioning conventions. You can’t really do all of the conventions in Amara, but it does remind you to think about readability and usability.

That’s it for the week! This week was pretty stressful outside of work, so I hope the weekend is better and I hope your weekend is good too.