Tweak Closed Caption Editor automatic placeholder generator theresholds

Oct 23, 2019

Armin Linder
By Armin Linder

Hi all,

I have to add closed captions (for people with hearing disabilities) to 600+ videos. The process using the Closed Captions Editor works quite good, but I feel there is room for for enhancements, since the auto-generated placeholders don't fit my material very well.

From what I see and read in the documentation I guess that the autogenerating process tries to find gaps in the audio stream, and inserts placeholders of up to 4s length, whichever comes first.

My material does quite often have slightly longer text passages (5-6s), and sometimes the gaps are spoiled by some background music or noise. Manually re-adjusting all those caption placeholders is a time-consuming process.

Is it somehow (including ways not in the GUI, like editing some registry settings or config files) possible to change the 4s limit and the volume thereshold so I can see whether I can get settings which produce better results when the placeholders are auto-generated? I sought the documentations up an down, and all the menus I could guess, but found no adjustable settings for the Closed Caption Editor autogeneration process.

Thanx, Armin.

2 Replies
Phil Mayor
over 4 years ago10/23/19 at 8:42 am (UTC)

I don't think there is anything you can adjust to do this. For 600 videos I would tempted to upload to YouTube and use the automatic closed captioning option then uploading that to storyline that way you only have to adjust them. 

I do think the algorithm tries to cut the size of the captioning down, there is recommendations on how many characters should be in a CC filed (if I remember correctly it is 90 characters with no more than 45 on each line and each line should be an inverse pyramid). This does n=mean breaking at commas and periods but ideally not mid sentence.

Armin Linder
over 4 years ago10/23/19 at 8:58 am (UTC)

Hi Phil,

thanks you for your quick reply.

The length and position of the placeholders is by customer demand/definition, so beyond discussion.

Furtunately my job isn't that complicated, since the spoken words are already available as text, I do not have to do the speech-to-text conversion or key-in the texts. I get the whole text of a movie as one long string via the clipboard, and copy it into the placeholders from left to right.

The only optimization which would come handy was not having to adjust/delete so many of the placeholders, so I'd prefer the defaults generated by the automatic process to be a bit more the way I need them.

But if there isn't a way, I live with what I have.

Thanks, Armin.

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