Mediasite

HOW TO: Create your own captions using YouTube's caption editor

There are a variety of products which allow you to transcribe and add timings to create captions for videos. A popular technique described below is to upload a copy of the video to YouTube and then use YouTube's caption editor to fine-tune the automatically generated captions.

Important Note: You should make any desired edits to your Mediasite video before you create and add captions. Mediasite will not automatically edit or remove portions of existing captions. For example, if a video already has captions, and you edit the video to remove the first 30 seconds of content, the existing captions will remain unchanged, meaning the captions will run 30 seconds behind the edited video. Creating and adding closed captions should occur after your final edit.

Upload your video to YouTube and edit the automatic captions

  1. Upload your video to YouTube. If your video is more than 15 minutes long, you may need to verify your YouTube account first. If you do not already have a copy of the video to upload, you can download the video from Mediasite using the Video Podcast delivery option.

  2. Under Show More, set the video language as English (United States). If English is not the primary language spoken in your video, choose the appropriate language. Videos containing multiple languages, dialects, or discipline-specific terminology may result in inconsistent transcription accuracy.

  3. Under Visibility, change the privacy setting of the YouTube video to Private to prevent others from watching it on YouTube.

  4. Once the video upload is complete, select Save.

  5. Within a few hours to a day, YouTube will automatically create captions for your video using machine-driven speech recognition; however, these captions are only 60-70 percent accurate on average, so you will want to edit the automatic captions. In YouTube Studio, select Subtitles from the left column.

  6. Select the name of the video for which you wish to edit the subtitles.

  7. For the video subtitles label ending in "(Automatic)," select Duplicate and Edit under the Subtitles column to open the YouTube caption editor. If you do not see subtitles labeled with "(Automatic)," the automatic captions have not yet been generated - please check back later.

  8. Play and edit the presented transcript as needed. See YouTube's help documentation for assistance. At a minimum, you should add proper punctuation and capitalization, and correct any mistakes made by the automatic speech recognition tool.

  9. Once you are satisfied with your edits, select Publish at the top-right. Your changes will be saved and you will be returned to the list of published subtitles that will contain your edited subtitiles.

Download your edited captions

  1. Hover your cursor over the edited subtitles in the list and select the "three dots" Options icon that appears to the right of the Edit button in the Subtitles column.

  2. Select Download and then select the .srt file option to download the new caption file to your computer.

    Note: be sure to choose the .srt option and not the .sbv option, which is not compatible with Mediasite.

Add the captions to your Mediasite presentation

Once you have downloaded the captions from YouTube, add the caption file to your Mediasite presentation.