Forum Discussion
Export closed captions in bulk?
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.
- ValesaClouse-44Community Member
If you do not plan to allow for exporting in bulk, it would be nice to have a single icon on the ribbon to export each file. Having to open captions and then export is a royal pain.
- CristinaEmbertoCommunity Member
I agree - that would be helpful.
- JustinLovett-75Community Member
Expect this feature in 2030. Exporting anything in bulk has been a huge pain-point of Storyline users for a long long time. I have found threads 7+ years old that still have active feature requests.
- PeterallenCommunity Member
Export/import captions in bulk is desperately needed by your loyal customers.
- PFitzgeraldCommunity Member
It is possible! If you change the extension of a project from .STORY to .ZIP, you can extract the contents and root around in the all of the associated files, including the .VTT captions.
First thing to do is make sure you are able to see your file extensions. Open an Explorer window, go to View tab > Options > View > disable "Hide extensions for known file types"
Now that you are able to see the extension for all file types:
- Make a copy of your .STORY project file.
- Change the extension to .ZIP.
- Extract all files from your new ZIP folder.
That should leave you with a folder with the same name as the copy of your original .STORY file. Open that folder and to the subfolder named ...\story\media
Here, you will see all contents of the project's Media Library, including the .VTT captions. The only drawback here is that the file names are randomized so you'll have to match them up with the audio/video files manually.
I've screencapped the process in the video below.
- KaterinaGrigoriCommunity Member
Peter, this is amazing! Saved me a ton of time!
Thank you so much for sharing!
- PFitzgeraldCommunity Member
Glad it worked out!
- HaleighSummersCommunity Member
Yes-this should be a feature icon for open & export minimally, but why stop there? Add them to the library so that we can bulk export. This is yet another practical and unaddressed request that is 2 years old.
- TriciaRansomCommunity Member
Hi everyone, original poster here. Please Articulate, please make this possible. Slide-by-slide and layer-by-layer is not helpful.
Thanks!
- PeterallenCommunity Member
Export AND import, please.
- ThorMelicher-b5Community Member
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 -
- Change the extension from your course file from ".story" to ".zip"
- 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?
- USCMartyCommunity Member
Please add my name to the list for exporting Closed Captions as well. Here is the business case for this feature:
Many of our clients expect a Word doc or PDF of the final produced E-Learning courses we create for them. Particularly for legal compliance courses, the content of the courses needs to be reviewed and edited by legal experts. While the logical solution is to just have them "take the E-Learning course", they OVERWELMINGLY prefer a document to quickly review the content.
We used to just use the NOTES area to add a transcript of any audio, which certainly worked well. But given that your media captions features are so robust (I really like how easy they are to use!) we've been putting captions there AND in the Notes section. While this works, it is redundant and there are a number of times where we update the Captions on the media but forget to update the Notes section.
Thus, if there was an option in the Word export feature to select to export Closed Captions and/or the Notes section, that would be hugely beneficial.
- JimBertelsenCommunity Member
I needed to be able to export captions (just the text, not the timecodes) in bulk, so I wrote some javascript that will export captions to a text document while progressing through the course. The attached story file provides an example.
Publish the story to html, open in a browser, and click the Export Captions button.
A new browser window will open, and captions will be exported to that window as you progress through the course. Remember to save the text before closing the window, or it will be lost.
Feel free to use/adapt the code for your purposes.- PFitzgeraldCommunity Member
This is very helpful. Could this code be adapted to extract the CCs and Media Library contents, while maintaining their original file names?
- JimBertelsenCommunity Member
I have created an app that does the following:
- Allows me (only, at this stage of development) to upload a Storyline 360 .story file, or select a previously uploaded .story file.
- Generates a report table of all audio & video files in the .story file, including:
- Names of original and converted media and caption files.
- If the caption file already has text, display the text, provide a word count for that file, and the total number of words in all captions in the .story file.
- Automatically generate speech-to-text captions files for each media file, individually or as an automated batch process for all media files.
- Export:
- The report as a Excel .xlsx file
- The Storyline 360 .story file, with updated captions
- The media and vtt files
I am considering adding:
- Search and replace text across all captions in one or multiple .story files.
- Machine translation of captions from one language to another for multiple languages
- Text-to-speech for multiple languages
I am continuing to develop and test the app. If you have a .story file that you could share for testing, I may be willing to provide you with a report and, possibly, the updated Storyline 360 with auto-generated captions.
Any feedback or suggestions would also be appreciated.
(Video attached.)Thanks,
Jim Bertelsen