Forum Discussion
Storyline: Merge/Concatenate Closed Captions
My team has recently started adding autogenerated captions to our videos and then tweaking them/editing the VTT captions within Storyline. There is a Split Caption function, but what would be really helpful is a Merge Captions function.
There's often full thoughts that would be better off merged into one complete caption, but I have to manually cut the second part, delete that caption bubble, paste it into the first part, and stretch it to fit. Repeat that at least 15 times per minute of a 20-minute video and it becomes a tedious process.
Is there a way where you can Merge Captions, similar to a concatenate function within Excel?
7 Replies
Hi BorgCube and MateuszSzuter-e,
I recently worked on a large Articulate Storyline project that involved editing and syncing a significant number of captions. Doing all of that in Storyline's built-in caption editor would have taken a lot of time and effort.
So I built a tool with Claude.ai to make caption syncing and editing more efficient.
The tool reads a Storyline (.story) file, extracts the audio, video and captions, and provides an efficient way to edit and sync them. When a media file doesn't have captions already, I first use Storyline's AI caption generation, then refine and sync the result in the tool. Once the editing is done, I export the updated captions and import them back into Storyline. The tool does not make changes to the Storyline file directly.
Using the tool saved me a lot of time. I am happy to share it here in case it can be useful to other community members.
The tool is a single HTML file that runs in a browser, with nothing to install. Attached is a zip containing the html file along with a user guide in pdf.
Please do not hesitate to let me know if you identify any issues.
It's been 4 years and they still haven't implemented this simple, but important QoL-feature.
Hi BorgCube and MateuszSzuter-e,
Thank you both for adding to this thread, and sorry it went so long without a staff reply. Four years is a long time to wait, and Mateusz, I’m sorry your question from earlier this year went unanswered.
At the moment, Storyline 360’s closed captions editor can split a caption into two but can’t merge two captions into one, and I don’t have a timeline to share. Until then, the closest option is the manual process Erin described at the top of this thread, which is moving the text into the first caption, deleting the extra caption, and dragging the end of the first caption to cover the full time. I know that adds up quickly across a long video.
It comes through clearly in this thread how much time merging captions by hand takes, and I appreciate you taking the time to share it.
Hey Articulate, is that something that can be expected to come live?
i would also like this feature to be added, specifically the ability to click a boundary between two caption blocks and merge them while retaining the same end-points.
Currently the default caption processing for text-to-speech ignores punctuation and line breaks, and I guess long pauses too, so even though I'm entering a bulleted list, the captions end up being all "half of one bullet and half of the next".
Hi, Erin and Kelly.
I'm not aware of a way to merge the captions from within Storyline, but this sounds like a great idea! You're welcome to submit a feature request directly to our team with your suggestions!
I agree with this! It takes hours to go through podcasts / videos - it would be good if we could merge 2-3 strings together to finish a thought...that would be so much easier and a major time saver!
