Forum Discussion
Closed Captions
I read a post that said Closed Captioning has to be turned on when a brand new project is started. Is this true?
If so how do I turn it on? I cannot find a setting for an option. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Connie Pearson
It does not have to be turned on, but if you want captions to come on when the course is launched, set the Built-In variable "Player.DisplayCaptions" to value True when the timeline starts on your first slide. Do this with a trigger.
Hi Connie! Thanks for posting your question here! To go along with the helpful tip Jeff shared, I wanted to point you to this article on how to use triggers to turn captions on.
Thank you Jeff and Sarah for you responses. I am still trying to understand how Closed Captions work in general. From what I can gather from reading posts and watching YouTube videos, the only way to set up Closed Captions for an entire course (every slide), is to manually click the audio for each slide and manually type the Caption into the little boxes that appear under the audio waves, which is extremely time consuming! I record an audio for every slide. I was assuming that Storyline would be able to transcribe each audio recording for me without having to type every word in manually. Does Storyline do this? if so, how??
The trigger that is explained in this post is assuming that someone has already typed in all the words for every slide - correct? I thought I had seen a post that said there was a project setting that could be turned on at the start so that Storyline would be creating the Closed Captions as each audio recording was being created.
I would be grateful if someone could explain the entire process. I realized that for courses that were created withOUT Closed Captioning turned on, there is no other way to add Closed Captioning but to manually type in each word. But what about a brand new project??
Hi Connie,
While Storyline 360 does not currently autotranscribe audio for closed captions, there are a number of ways you can add captions to a new or existing course.- As you've already discovered, you can manually add closed captions to a course. You can type the text in, but if you've got an existing script then copying and pasting in your content can save you lots of time. That's actually the approach I use most often.
- As Kami mentioned, you can import your script as text-to-speech audio and Storyline 360 can automatically create your closed caption files for you. One way to do this is to sync up your text-to-speech timing with your recorded audio, export your captions as a VTT file (this is a type of closed captions file), delete the TTS audio track, and then import the VTT captions file to your actual audio track. It's a few steps, but they're all pretty fast and straightforward. And if you need more help, this article goes into a lot more detail about how closed captions work in Storyline 360.
- You can also use a transcription service to create caption files for you. There are a number of services that transcribe audio or video files and then provide you with a closed captions file (such as a VTT or SRT file) that you can quickly import into your Storyline 360 file with just a click. If you happen to have Adobe Premiere, it can also do speech-to-text transcription and export the resulting closed captioning files.
I personally take advantage of the text-to-speech option and populate the notes section with my script. I use the Insert tab, add audio via Text-to-speech - select the include closed captions checkbox and click the Include Notes Section button. When my audio clips are ready I can just replace the audio clip. You will still want to sync the closed captions with your audio and clean them up a bit.
You still have to put the text somewhere with this method, which is in the Notes section. It's much easier than having to plug them in individually caption by caption. And, your audio clips have to be saved for each slide and layer individually.
I hope this helps.
Kami - I tried your suggestion, but now I have two audios for a slide - my voice and the Text-to-speech voice. I don't want the Text-to-speech voice, but it appears if I delete the Text-to-Speech audio from the timeline, then the closed captions go away too.
Any suggestions?
You may have already added your audio to the slide, you'll need to remove yours then replace the text-to-speech audio with your audio file. Highlight the Text-to-Speech item on the timeline, then use the Audio Tools Options tab, select the Replace Audio drop down and select audio from file. Select your audio for that slide or layer. I have my audio clips saved in a separate folder for my project and saved by slide.
Let me know how that works for you. :-)
I didn't know you could save the "record Mic" audio files. Do they save somewhere on my PC automatically and I just don't know it? how do you save an audio file to a folder?
Yup! You can save any audio file that's in your Storyline 360 course to a separate location of your choice. All you have to do is these steps:
- First, do any of the following:
- Select the audio track, then click Export Audio on the ribbon.
- Right-click the audio icon at the lower left corner of the slide and select Export Audio.
- Right-click the audio track in the timeline and select Export Audio.
- Browse to the location where you want to save the exported audio clip and give it a file name.
- Use the Save as type drop-down list to choose a file format. You can export audio as MP3, WAV, or both.
- Click Save to complete the export process.
- First, do any of the following:
