Caption Editor

AST DBA Verbit U.S. provides a Caption Editor that allows you to edit the results of a successfully captioned submission or repair a failed submission. Our Caption Editor allows you to:

• Modify caption text and its timing.
• Change individual caption alignment.
• Split captions.
• Insert new captions.
• Modify caption horizontal and vertical placement.
• Search & Replace.

The approach for repairing areas not in sync is to adjust the timing of key captions in sweetened areas such as [ Music ], then save it and let the synchronization engine subsequently adjust the timing for the whole file. In a long clean audio narration, you might only need to adjust the timing of one middle caption.

Using the Caption Editor:

Submit your video/audio file for captioning; once captioning is completed, go to Caption -> Submission Details page, and click the Use Caption Editor link:

You'll then see the Caption Editor page. Note that, currently, a video will only be displayed if your original format was a .MP4, .M4V, or .F4V, and within the first 45 days after the initial submission. If a different format was made available to us and/or after that period of time, there will only be an audio version of your content to work with. So you'll see Audio Only on the player:

On the left, are the individual captions; and on the right, the player. If you click on the Play button, the current playing caption will be highlighted:

If you click a caption, the player, and the caption timeline at the bottom, will jump to that point.

You can use the timeline at the bottom to adjust the timing of individual captions. You just need to double-click the corresponding caption, and once it's highlighted, drag the box to the desired start or end time in the timeline. For media files over 20 minutes in length, please see the additional notes section.

Or, you can extend or shorten the duration of the selected caption.

Note: captions cannot overlap, so, if the captions you're editing are overlapping in the timeline, then you'll see the following dialog box:

The Current Caption table at the bottom displays Start Time, End Time, Horizontal Alignment, Vertical Alignment and Number of Characters for the current caption. The Caption Editor player can only display captions in the center-bottom of the screen, so use this table to see where the caption would appear if your media player/caption file supports horizontal or vertical alignment:

If you click the Pencil icon, located on each caption, you'll see a dialog box with several features:

Using the Plus and Minus buttons, you can edit the start and end timestamps of the captions.

The Alignment menus specify the placement of the captions onscreen. With the Alignment menu, you can place the captions at the left, middle or right of the screen. With the V-alignment menu, you can place the captions at the top or bottom of the screen. *Please note not all caption formats use caption placement information, and so if you do a Redo to generate new results, you may not see the Alignment changes reflected all caption formats.

Using the text box, you can edit the text in the captions, and apply styles to the words.

The Split button will split the caption where your cursor is, generating an extra caption.

The Delete button will delete an individual caption. It will be effectively removed from the timeline. Use with caution as the audio still needs to match the text.

Ensure you click the Save button to keep all your changes. You can use Cancel to cancel all changes made to an individual caption.

The Search & Replace feature combines the functionalities of a regular Find and Find & Replace options. You can search for a specific word(s), and replace all its instances:

With the Insert Before and Insert After features, you can add new captions before or after the selected caption:

Additional Notes:

• We only keep the original video files for about 45 days after the initial request. So after this time, only an audio version of the media will be available to work with on the editor.
  
  
• If you make extensive amounts changes to a submission, we recommend clicking Save and Redo periodically to ensure a sane rollback point. This will trigger a new Redo every time you click the button, and so you will need to continue the editing work from the new Redo ID page.
  
  
• If your media file is over 20 minutes in length, the caption timeline at the bottom will be split into shorter sections, and that will prevent you from dragging a caption from one section to the next (20 minutes sections using Chrome or Safari, and 6 minutes sections using Firefox). The workaround is to use the left-hand caption pane to edit those timestamps.

• We do not recommend using the Editor on Internet Explorer. If you don't have access to a modern browser (like Firefox or Google Chrome), we recommend using the Redo feature instead to edit your results.

• Please ensure you follow our Transcription Guidelines when you're editing the caption text, namely the General Formatting Guidelines and the Caption Breaks Guidelines.

• If you need different outputs/settings, you should refer to the Redo feature.

• The Caption Editor is made available to users at no cost. We endeavor to keep it up to date, but changes to browsers are frequent and usually unannounced, so we are unable to guarantee that all features will work on all browsers, all the time. If you find a feature is not working as expected, please use the Redo feature instead, and let us know about the issues you encountered so that we can repair them.