Add captions

Something like this would be a lot more useful.

this makes no sense

This is not helpful.

There's a number of pesky UI issues here too.

• no keyboard shortcuts for deleting individual captions
• the "insert caption" option isn't always active for some reason (I have to click multiple times)
• "insert captions" appears to have a set length, which is almost always incorrect
• bringing up "add captions" or "edit captions" has a set window display size (see attached). I have to resize it *every* time.

Hi Kyle,

Looks like we missed your posts over our Thanksgiving holiday - sorry for the delay!

The closed caption editor is picking up the placement and length of the initial captions based on how we analyze the audio to detect speech, in addition to some rules for making sure a place holder isn't too long or too short, so it may not always be exact. Other things that could impact it, are background music, or a less than clear recording.

We did fairly extensive testing on this with a group of beta users and our internal teams, and it found that the auto-generated placeholders work pretty well for most folks. If they're not capturing what you need, you can always use the Delete function to remove them and then create your own manually.

hope you will continue to do testing. My recordings are crystal clear and
I have no background music.

Hi Kyle,

Would you be willing to share a copy of your file with us? I know you mentioned already making changes, so perhaps save a copy the next time you conduct a recording or insert audio files to generate closed captions? 

If you can, pop it here as an Attachment or send it along to our Support Engineers here. 

Sorry for the delay on this. Attaching a storyline file, and an example of an audio recording from the project. If you import the audio and try to add captions, it's a mess - see screenshots.

Hi there, Kyle. Thanks for following up with your examples, and no worries about the delay! We’re always here.

You demonstrated some captions that are too short in duration. Also, some of the captions didn’t align with the length of the audio. I’ve shared these examples with our team so we can continue improving the algorithm.

Currently, the technology analyzes the audio and creates placeholders where it detects a natural break. In most cases, the net benefit of starting with a set of captions is enough to justify a tweak here and there. Obviously, we don’t want the tweaking to consume your time. A few of your examples showed where the captions were too brief to be useable, and it isn’t ideal for you to rework so many.

If you’re consistently reworking the captions, and it makes more sense to import them at this time, we support standard formats such as .srt and .vtt.

I’ll keep this discussion updated with any news of caption improvements. Thanks again for taking the time to share your experience, Kyle.

Thanks for the response. This is a fairly significant shortcoming if the
tool. I’d suggest that in its current state, this functionality is next to
useless. In fact, it creates more work.

Is there a way to elevate the priority?

Hi Kyle,

This has been shared with our Product team, and they helped in the testing that Crystal did in your examples.

Our team is small, so please know that it is a very short ladder that things are running up, and we really are trying to do what we can to make a product you love and want to continue using. We'll let you know here any changes to this feature. 

This additional work and it’s costing me thousands of dollars. This is on
top of the hefty license fee I pay to you.

While it’s great to hear that my concerns are being heard, I should have to
experience them in the first place.

And just to restate, I am following your best practices for this
functionality.