Persistent Notes to the Transcriber

Closed Captioning your files with CaptionSync allows you to keep persistent notes for the transcribers. This article shows how.

Our guidance for transcriber feature allows you to send notes and specific instructions to the transcribers. But there are several use cases where the Persistent Notes can be very useful:

1. When the notes are the same for all the media files and it is cumbersome to add them manually each time.
2. When using a 3rd-party integration that does not allow to send guidance.
3. When there are URLs to videos, PDFs, etc., different for each item, but that can be determined based on the filename of the media submitted. In this case you can use Macros, as described below.

Adding Persistent Notes to your account:

• Go to Settings -> Persistent Notes, and click Add New Persistent Note:  

• Add the Title and the notes, and click Add Persistent Note. Make sure you use a small Title.

• If you have attachments (for example, the script of your movie, or slides with the lecturer's notes), you can make them available online, and then add the link to the file to the Persistent Notes. You can use services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Hightail, etc, and publish your file as "public" and "unlisted". Then paste the URL to your file in the Persistent Notes, and explain what it pertains to.

• You can have as many notes as you need, but only one can be default at a given time (or they can all be disabled). Any notes you add via the respective user interface (in the Guidance field) will be added to the Persistent Note active at the time, and all will be sent to the transcriber.

• Also note that submissions made via AST-Link or other Integrations will have the Default Persistent Note associated with them, and the transcribers assigned to those submissions will follow the instructions on those Notes. Make sure your notes are up to date and select them according to the content being submitted.

• When you make List of URLs and web submissions you can select any of your saved notes (or deselect the default) at submit time. Expand Add Guidance to find the Persistent Note drop-down menu, and select the note the transcriber(s) should use. The Add Guidance row turns green when a Persistent Note is being used. If you prefer to add guidance for the current request, instead of using any of the existing Persistent Notes, you just need to select None, on that drop-down:

Disabling Persistent Notes:

You can't delete Persistent Notes, but you can edit them and deselect them as default. To ensure they're not associated with AST-Link or other Integrations submissions, you just need to uncheck them as default. They will still show as an option on List of URLs and web submissions.

Using Macros:

There are two macros available:

• {FileBaseName}
• {CleanBaseName}

They must match exactly, including the mixed case and the curly braces.

The former substitutes the base filename of the media file you submitted. The latter removes the dashes and the like. For example, if you submitted sci-101-lecture-5.mp4, {FileBaseName} would be sci-101-lecture-5 , and {CleanBaseName} would be sci101lecture5 respectively.

So you might, for example, want have a note that says:

  Lecture notes can found at http://10.34.56.1/pdfs/{FileBaseName}.pdf 
and the video can accessed at http://10.69.31.56/video/arc/?id={CleanBaseName} 
with the username "transcribe" and password "summer" .

Then, when you submit lecture-0001.wmv, lecture-0002.wmv, summary.wmv , the notes will be:

  Lecture notes can found at http://10.34.56.1/pdfs/lecture-0001.pdf 
and the video can accessed at http://10.69.31.56/video/arc/?id=lecture0001 
with the username "transcribe" and password "summer" .

  Lecture notes can found at http://10.34.56.1/pdfs/lecture-0002.pdf 
and the video can accessed at http://10.69.31.56/video/arc/?id=lecture0002 
with the username "transcribe" and password "summer" .

  Lecture notes can found at http://10.34.56.1/pdfs/summary.pdf 
and the video can accessed at http://10.69.31.56/video/arc/?id=summary 
with the username "transcribe" and password "summer" .

Important Notes:

• Our transcribers identify speaker changes just with a double chevron, e.g. >> Speech.
  If you wish to have our transcribers identify speakers by name (e.g. >> Pat: Speech), you need to make that request either via Persistent Notes, or via Guidance field, at submission time.

• If you wish to restrict your submission(s) to transcribers with expertise in a specific area, you can use our Transcriber Preference feature.

• If you wish to set a Commonwealth English spelling preference, you can use our Regional Spelling Preference feature.