Captions for Publishing a Course to a Video File

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!

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

Hey Nikki,

No update to share on this topic yet.

I wanted to share some information about how we manage these feature requests as that may be helpful. 

This conversation is attached to the report, so we'll be able to pop in and update you when we can.

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...

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.

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. :-(

+1 for the feature request: exporting storyline as a video with captions

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?

I am trying to do this right now as well as the exported caption file looks terrible when I add it to my MP4 file- white on white, not aligned the way I want it- and I have no idea how to fix it right now. Would love to export Storyline as video with captions!!!

+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.