Captions for Publishing a Course to a Video File

Jan 31, 2018

Thank you for the new option to publish storyline course directly to video. This is very helpful.

Is there a way to export one caption file for all slides in the Storyline file? I see an export option for individual slides, but not the entire project.

Pinned Reply
Kelly Auner

Hi, everyone!

I have some great news to share. We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 73, we’ve included important fixes and new features!

One new feature we’ve included:

Boost video accessibility by including closed captions when publishing projects as MP4 video files.

To take advantage of this update, launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here.

Please let me know if you need additional help!

54 Replies
Crystal Horn

Hi Jakob!  Thanks for reaching out.  You're right -- currently you can export individual caption files for your slides.

My team and I think you bring up a couple of great potential feature requests that could bridge the gap between our closed captioning options and publishing to .mp4.

  • Ability to export all captions from all videos into a single export file
  • Ability to include closed captions when publishing for .mp4

I'll submit these ideas to our team for review.  Here's a look at how we manage feature requests.  Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!

Nikki May

Hi Crystal!

Having just completed my first full storyline project with closed captions this morning, my client has signed it off in Articulate Review and I've just gone to publish it as MP4 (as it is being embedded in YouTube on a website)....and the captions aren't there despite me using a global variable to switch them on permanently! Do you have any updates on the status of this feature request as I can't find any other information?

Thanks, Nikki

Nikki May

Hi Leslie,

Thanks for the update. I've tried to be inventive and find a way around this problem, but have encountered ANOTHER issue, which I'll describe here as you said this conversation is linked to the feature request. Hopefully someone will understand my pain!

Following your response I decided to export my Storyline MP4 video and import it into Replay so I could re-do the captions there (as I know from previous use that Replay DOES export to MP4 with captions. I then established that Storyline can export caption files, so I exported all 16 of my caption files as .VTT files but I then discovered that Replay does not import caption files...

Not to be outdone, I managed to find a convoluted way to open the .VTT files in Google Chrome, so that at least I could copy and paste each individual caption into the 'Lower Third' function in Replay, which I proceeded to do in painstaking fashion...

So, I get approximately halfway through the video, and to my complete dismay, just ONE of the original Storyline captions is suddenly there on the screen, and to make it worse, it STAYS on the screen for the rest of the video...so there is nothing I can do to remove it. I'm back to square one...I replayed the original MP4 exported from Storyline and realise that Storyline did indeed export just ONE of my captions and left it on screen, but how??

My next course of action is to go back to Storyline, and DELETE every single caption, then export it to MP4 again and then use the caption files I have already exported to add them back into the Lower Third in Replay. 

I have to admit I'm slightly simmering about this, as I'm now a week behind my promised delivery date and still haven't yet delivered. My customer has been very nice about it, but I feel like a bit of an idiot!

I've attached a screenshot showing the point where the rogue original Storyline caption appears...

Alan Baertschi

I'm truly surprised that the publish to video option doesn't allow for captions. 

How would you suggest I created a captions file to upload to YouTube?

If I use the export captions feature, it only exports one slide; there's no way to combine them all so that the timing matches up for the whole presentation.

Vincent Scoma

Hey Alan,

Thank you for reaching out!

Since there isn't a way to export all of the closed captions at once, you'll want to export the captions for each audio file individually. 

Another option to consider is to check out YouTube's options for closed captioning: Add your own subtitles & closed captions

I am attaching this conversation to our report, so you are in the right place when we provide updates on this feature. 

Carie Whitehead

Just popping in to say how much I would love to be able to export ALL captions at once. I have a different use case, but the same need. We are updating a course and one issue is that the department's name changed (the department referenced in the course). I exported to Course text to Word (using the translation export) and then did Find and Replace to edit the department name throughout. Unfortunately, now we need to go through and fix the audio to match. Since everything is closed captioned, I wanted to export the captions and do the same find and replace. However, as I found and this thread confirms, I would need to export each audio file's captions one at a time. :-(

Joshua Kaplan

Just wanted to add to this comment thread. We frequently create software simulations with voice-over narration and publish as video files instead of SCORM packages. Our clients are usually in noisy settings, so they need the ability to watch the video with captions.

What we really need is a checkbox in the publish settings that can export all the captions as one VTT file when you publish to video. Exporting each VTT file separately is not an option because the timings are not correct for the entire resulting video. 

Is there anything I need to do to put in a feature request for this?

Jerry Fernandez

+1 for the feature request: exporting Storyline as a video with open or closed captions

+1 for exporting captions for an ENTIRE scene, not just per slide.  NOTE: It doesn't makes sense that you allow a scene to be exported as an MP4 video, but don't allow a matching caption file to be exported with it.  

Thanks for your consideration.

Alan Baertschi

Publish Options

I spent hours and hours inserting captions to match the narration of a course. The client asks if they can have a video file in addition to the SCORM files, and I say NO PROBLEM! Storyline has an export as video option! Oh, hang on. There's no option to include captions. The only option is to RECREATE ALL THE CAPTIONS AGAIN to make an .srt file. Oof.
 

Meg Mikula

This is really a frustrating issue!  You can't export a video with captions, you can't download a .srt captions file, you can't import captions files... you need to expedite these requests related to closed captioning.  These are real ADA and 508 concerns as far as accessibility for learners.  And, real concerns as far as software choice.

Joshua Kaplan

I just popped in to check on the status of this and I realized the original request is over two years old!

I certainly appreciate the Agile software development process and the fact that there are other priorities, but Meg Mikula is correct. This is a serious ADA and 508 compliance issue. When will we see some movement on this?

Jim Naroski

I definitely agree with the frustration. I had a few hours of content created for a proof of concept, assuming caption production from text-to-speech was included when publishing to video. It seemed like such an obvious requirement. Only after I was ready to publish  did I realize there was no such feature. I ended up uploading the videos to YouTube as unlisted and used their auto-translate future. I used YouTube studio to edit the machine generated translation, and exported it to an SRT file. All the while, I already had perfectly good closed captions sitting in Storyline that I could not use. 

Please take the time to submit a feature request at  https://articulate.com/support/contact/feature-request as I do not see this on the Storyline 360 roadmap at https://articulate.com/support/article/Articulate-360-Feature-Roadmap.

kara myers

It seems silly we pay for storyline yet I have to export to YouTube for auto generated captions then can insert those into scorm only  files and can not export them as mp4’s. Also super frustrating. Please work on this, I mean google meeting does live auto generated captions, there has to be a solution in storyline for this problem. 

Katie Riggio

Hi All,

Thank you for all your contributions!

We treat each comment here as a vote for a feature idea. That way, we can make sure we accurately document the need. 

To help you plan, we don't have immediate plans to include closed captions when publishing for video. We promise to let you know if that changes.

Given the impact, we will continue our discussions around this feature. That is one of many steps in our feature evaluation process, but I hope it affirms that we are listening. 

Let me know if there's anything else I can do. I'm happy to help!

Alan Baertschi

Thanks for the reply, Katie.
Honestly, it's quite shocking that this isn't seen as an essential accessibility component. When we create an eLearning course with Storyline, we spend a lot of time syncing captions to the narration. But all those captions we spend hours on are completely unusable when exporting as a video, so we have to figure out a workaround in a different program.

Katie, how many "votes" do the Articulate decision-makers need to be convinced of this necessity?

Carie Whitehead

Agreed! I also would like to see the ability to export the full course's captioning in one file (right now you need to do it audio clip by audio clip. I want to be able to adjust the font/font size of the captions because if the course is at a high resolution, the captions are very small. Finally I want to be able to spellcheck the captions. Right now I do that in Word before I copy/paste them in,