Export closed captions in bulk?

Oct 09, 2017

Is it possible to export closed captions in bulk? I have a course with 9 scenes, each scene at least 10-20 slides and/or layers. As you can imagine, exporting the captions slide by slide, layer by layer, is brutal.

71 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Tricia,

Are you able to share your .story file with us? That way we can look at the captions you included vs. what is on the screen and do some additional testing from there. You can share it here using the "Add Attachment" at the bottom of the reply or send it along to our Support team by uploading here. 

Ren Gomez

Hi Cristina,

Currently, closed captions are exported one-by-one because audio and video files are treated as individual files. We don’t have plans for a feature to export all media captions in bulk right now, but we appreciate you letting us know this is important to you. We’ll update this discussion if our plans change in the future.

Thor Melicher

Tricia and Peter,
I may have a solution that should work for doing a bulk export of captions (sorry, I can't do the bulk import!)  If you're interested, would you send me a private message?  You can do this by clicking on my name and then click Contact Me.  You'll need to be running Windows 10 for this solution to work.  I've tested it with a small sample size but I need others to test to see if it works on a larger scale. :)

Please note: I would reach out to you with a private message but for some reason my account doesn't seem to be configured correctly when sending messages.

Thor Melicher

I believe there are two solutions in approaching this problem but they both come up short in that it's not possible to match the original filename to the Storyline named file.

Method 1 -

  1. Change the extension from your course file from ".story" to ".zip"
  2.  Open the file and navigate to the story\media folder and search for the ".vtt" files.

Method 2 - Publish your course and then translate the generated _caption.js files into something readable.

Thanks Peter for talking through this and pointing out Method 1.  Perhaps one day the Media Library will offer a bulk exporter in the future?

Thor Melicher

Hi, Steve - Not sure what you mean - would you mind enlightening us? 

One other thing that I found since my last post is the Media Library within Storyline does make it a tad faster to export your captions, still one at a time but it's not necessary to go one slide at a time, either:

From the menu bar,

  1. Click View | Media Library
  2. Select Video
  3. *Next to Captions, click Edit Captions
  4. Click Export...

*When clicking Edit Captions you would think it would start editing captions but instead you get the following choices: Edit, Replace, Export, Delete, and Apply to All.  Not sure what Apply to All means as it is also shown for Alt Text, too.

 

Rebecca Wilson

Hello. Another user looking for being able to bulk export. I was hoping to a quick and easy way to do a full spelling check on all the captions that I entered. I have 21 scenes and too many slides and layer to count, so exporting one at a time is just not an option, I'm better off just going through and reading each one a couple times and crossing my fingers all are caught. If I could export everything to a word doc, can easily run a spell check and correct errors.