Transcripts and Captions allow you to streamline the process of repurposing and reviewing content, adhere to accessibility regulations/expectations, and ensure your video content is available to a larger audience.
This article provides information about closed captions and instructions on generating and exporting a captions file of your Socialive recordings and clips.
You must be an Administrator, Creator, or Producer in your Socialive account.
- What are transcriptions?
- What are closed captions (CC)?
- What is a captions file?
- Which videos are supported for closed captions?
- What caption file formats are supported?
- What languages are supported?
- Generate and export a captions file
- Troubleshooting
What are transcriptions?
Transcription refers to the process by which audio is converted into written text and made available as a document. It may or may not include time codes.
In Socialive, this is available in (.txt) format and will include time codes. The producer’s audio is also included as it is often helpful to have their questions/guidance on the transcription.
What are closed captions (CC)?
Closed Captions (CC) are text versions of a video's spoken part and atmospherics (i.e., music, and sound effects).
What is a captions file?
A captions file is a plain-text file containing the text of what is said in the video, along with time codes for each line of text. In Socialive, caption files will be available in (.srt) or (.vtt) format.
Most popular video platforms support captioning by uploading one or more captions files to a particular video.
Which videos are supported for closed captions?
You can generate transcription and caption files for composite videos, ISOs, and clips. This feature won’t entail live captioning or imprinting any captions on video files; it is a feature that provides the necessary files.
What caption file formats are supported?
WebVTT (.vtt) – Web Video Text Track- machine-readable, suitable to use as a caption track, supports metadata and formatting aimed at many/most web players
SubRip (.srt)- machine-readable, suitable to use as a caption track, wider compatibility but fewer formatting metadata options.
Transcript (.txt)- human readable, with time stamps
What languages are supported?
Socialive uses Amazon Transcribe as a back-end service to generate transcripts and captions. The supported languages are determined by this service, which may expand in the future.
1. Audio quality impacts transcription - if the audio is clearly at normal volume, in a generally quiet environment, the transcript should be accurate.
2. It is always important to read over the files before adding them directly to your video in an external editing tool.
3. Amazon Transcribe struggles with accuracy if multiple languages are detected in a recording. It will usually pick up the first language spoken.
4. There will be issues with files where no audio is detected; the email will indicate that the processing failed.
The current languages supported are:
Afrikaans
Arabic (Gulf, Modern Standard)
Chinese (Simplified, Traditional)
Danish
Dutch
English (Australian, British, Indian, Irish, New Zealand, Scottish, South African, US, and Welsh)
French (FR-French, and Canadian)
German (DE-German, and Swiss)
Hebrew
Hindi
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Malay
Portuguese (PT-Portuguese, and Brazilian)
Russian
Spanish (Spain and US)
Swedish
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Vietnamese
For the most up-to-date information, check out Amazon Transcribe’s support article here.
Generate and export a captions file
Within Portal, select the appropriate Space and navigate to Library.
Click the thumbnail of the clip or session for which you want to generate captions and transcript files.
Click the Download button in the left panel.
Click “Generate file” for the desired option, you will see a confirmation message at the top-right corner that will show how long it will take to the file to be available, this will depend on the length of the video.
When the file is ready, you’ll receive an email from Socialive with a direct link to download the file in VTT, SRT, or TXT format.
Troubleshooting
There will be errors for video files over 2GB. An error email will be sent with directions for troubleshooting. If there is an error:
Go back to the recording that you would like to generate captions for.
Click to export to audio (MP3), and wait for the success email to be received
Lastly, return to the video to generate a caption on and click to export captions again
Still, looking for an answer?
Contact Socialive Support via live chat, email at support@socialive.us, or submit a support ticket.