Closed Captioning, Transcription, and Subtitling
1 Introduction This guide shows you the basics of how to quickly create high quality transcripts, closed captions, translations, and interactive transcripts in order to make your videos accessible, searchable, SEO-friendly, and more engaging in any language. Our mission is to make it easy for you to caption your video content. You can use 3Play Media as a standalone web-based service or as a black box that interfaces with other media systems. We make this possible through a user-friendly account system, flexible APIs, and integrations with video players, platforms, and lecture capture systems. For additional information, including video tutorials, detailed guides, and frequently asked questions, please visit www.3playmedia.com.
2 How to Upload Your Video or Audio Files There are several ways to upload your videos. You can upload files from your computer, via links, via FTP, or using our API. You can also submit files for captioning directly from one of the video platforms or lecture capture systems with which we have an integration. We offer six different turnaround options in an effort to help you meet your deadlines. Standard turnaround is 4 business days, or you can request 2 business days, 1 business day, or 8 hour service. We also offer 2 hour turnaround for short files and discounted 10 day turnaround for files that aren t as urgent. You ll receive an email when your files are complete.
3 What If I Already Have a Transcript? If you already have a transcript for your video, automatic transcript alignment is the fastest and least expensive way to create captions, translations, and use interactive video plugins. Select Alignment Only when you upload your media file, then upload the transcript. We ll automatically synchronize the text with the video to create closed captions. What If I Already Have Captions? If you already have captions for your videos, you can import them into 3Play Media. From there, you can convert your captions into 50+ output formats, create searchable interactive transcripts, make edits, translate your captions into other languages, and securely manage your assets.
4 How to Download Your Captions and Transcripts To download captions, select the appropriate file and download as many caption formats as you require. There is no limit to the number of downloads, and we offer over 50 different caption formats. Your captions and transcript files are stored in your account and you can download them at any time.
5 How to Submit Spanish Files for Captioning and Transcription If you have Spanish video or audio content, you can submit your files for Spanish captioning and transcription. You can upload files from your computer, via links, via FTP, or using our API. When you upload your Spanish files, simply select Spanish-Latin America Transcription and Captioning. The accuracy for Spanish captioning is more than 99% accurate, even in cases of poor audio quality, multiple speakers, difficult content, or accents. After your media files have been uploaded they are processed by professional transcriptionists who leverage our advanced technology, process, and workflow.
6 How to Automate Your Captioning Workflow Linking your 3Play Media account with your lecture capture system or video platform automates the captioning workflow, allowing you to add captions with a click of a button.
7 Cattura Ensemble
8 How to Edit Captions Although rarely necessary, the caption editor makes it easy to edit your captions after they have been processed. You can use the editing options at the top of the interface to edit or delete a word, apply formatting, or edit a paragraph. Edits will propogate to all outputs and will update automatically in most video platforms.
9 How to Translate Your Videos and Create Multilingual Subtitles After your videos have been transcribed, it is easy to translate them into many different languages. Our translation services are seamlessly integrated with our captioning and transcription services, as well as our video plugins. You can download multilingual subtitles and transcripts in a variety of formats to suit your needs. We are integrated with multiple translation vendors to give you the best variety of languages, quality, and turnaround options. DIY Subtitling with Amara Amara is a free platform that makes it easy to translate your captions into other languages. Our integration with Amara lets you do the translation yourself or collaborate with a team. After the translations are completed in Amara, they are transferred back to your 3Play Media account.
10 How to Add an Interactive Transcript Adding an interactive transcript to your website allows your users to interact with your video in an entirely new way. Users can search the video and navigate by clicking on any word to jump to that exact point. You can also use a plugin to search across a library of videos to find specific mentions of a topic. An interactive transcript can be added to any website by inserting an embed code it s the same process as embedding a video player. You can get the embed code from your 3Play Media account after your files have been transcribed. The interactive transcript works with most video players, and you can easily customize the size, look, and features. We also have an SDK for more advanced customization.
11 How to Publish Captions for YouTube Videos You Don t Own The captions plugin is a free tool that lets you add closed captions and multilingual subtitles to almost any video, even if it s on someone else s YouTube channel. It even works with players that don't support captions. Plus, it makes your videos searchable and SEO-friendly.
12 How to Automatically Generate Captions for Your Video Clips The FCC requires video clips of full-length TV shows to have closed captions when published online. Our patent-pending technology automatically generates closed captions for clips by extracting them from the full-length video captions. This scalable process is extremely cost-effective and avoids the need to recreate closed captions that already exist for the full-length video. Simply upload your video clips to the full-length file in your account. Minutes later, captions will be available for your clips in any major format. This process works for single excerpt clips as well as montages or mashups.
13 Caption Placement for FCC Compliance One of the FCC s requirements for caption quality is that captions can t block other important visual content on the screen. This means that if text or other information appears at the bottom of the screen, the captions must be moved so as not to obstruct this content. Our patent-pending solution automatically detects when there is important textual information in the lower third and moves the caption frame to the top of the screen. This automated process is sufficiently accurate for most applications, but there is also an option for our editors to do it manually.
14 Open Captions & Encoded Captions Usually, captions are output as a separate side car file that is added to a video player, which renders the captions in sync with the video. However, sometimes it is beneficial to embed the captions as a track or to burn the captions into the video itself. Caption-encoded videos can be seen on iphones and ios devices, and open captioning ensures that your video will play with captions across all media and devices.
15 How to Create Clips and Highlight Reels For video editors and market researchers, the Clipmaker tool allows you to create a clip reel by splicing sections of the transcripts. You can rearrange clips, edit selections, and export the reel as a new video asset for rough editing and inclusion in reports.
16 About 3Play Media 3Play Media provides premium captioning, transcription, and subtitling to more than 1,600 customers in higher ed, enterprise, media and entertainment, and government. Our goal is to simplify the process through flexible APIs, a secure web system, and integrations with numerous video players and platforms. 3Play Media is based in Cambridge, MA and has been operating since 2008. Sales Website www.3playmedia.com Email sales@3playmedia.com Phone (617) 764-5189 x1 Technical Support Website support.3playmedia.com Email support@3playmedia.com Phone (617) 764-5189 x 2
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