Chapter 12 – Microsoft PowerPoint,
Captions
13:38 mins
15.06.2012
[Screen shot of a PowerPoint document]
Daniel:
But that brings us to what I think is the more fun of these two demos,
which is something that we call STAMP, which is the Subtitling Addins for Microsoft PowerPoint, S-T-A-M-P. Subtitling Add-ins for
Microsoft PowerPoint.
And the idea of STAMP is that many times we will embed videos into
PowerPoint presentations, or we have the need to caption videos, and
there aren’t many very easy tools to do this. So we’ve created this
plug-in that essentially is a turnkey solution for creating captions.
So I have a blank Slide here on my PowerPoint presentation, I have it
set in the 15 x 9 aspect ratio, just because it’s a widescreen video that I
know that I’m going to be importing. When I click on the Insert tab
here in PowerPoint I’m then going to go to the far right hand side and
you’ll see there’s an Insert Video.
[Present clicks in Insert – Video – Insert Video]
I’m going to click on that and I’m going say I’m going to insert video
from a file.
[Presenter clicks on Video from File]
And when I do that it opens up my Documents library, and here’s a file
here that I’m going to insert.
[Presenter clicks on a file name in the Documents Library]
So I double click on that, and it’s going to insert that. And I’m going
to just resize this, so that it fills up the entire screen.
[Presenter selects and resizes the box]
There we go. So now when I plug in my audio again, you’ll be able to
hear the audio video. So if I run the show here, and I play the movie.
[Presenter clicks on Play and the video begins]
And being from Seattle I have to, of course, I like Starbucks.
[Audio is coming from the video that is being played]
OK, you get the idea, the video, and we need to now add some captions
to that. So I’ve come back to the main Slide screen, and when I select
that video, in the upper menu here you’ll notice that it’s then added the
tab here, Video Tools.
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Chapter 12 – Microsoft PowerPoint,
Captions
13:38 mins
15.06.2012
[Presenter selects the video, and moves the arrow to the top right hand
side of the menu to demonstrate the Video Tools tab]
And the first one is formatting, I can do a few things to change and
correct the video, and all sorts of stuff.
[Presenter clicks on Format, and then a menu box is listed]
We’re going to ignore that. I’m going to come to the Playback button,
and under Playback, on the right hand side you’ll see when I’ve added
this plug-in it adds this menu area for captions. And so there’s a button
that says Add Captions.
[Presenter clicks on the Playback button, and a menu box is displayed
which shows the option Add Captions]
That gives me two choices; one is to Create Captions, and the other one
is to create Captions from a File.
[Menu box displays Create Captions; Captions From File]
A little technical. If you’re familiar with something that’s called
PTML, which is Plain Text Markup Language for the uber geeks in the
room, you can create an XML file which contains everything from time
codes to caption, you can synchronise this. If I had that file already I
could just import that data, the captions would appear, and you’d be
done.
How many people know how to construct PTML or XML files?
Nobody. Neither do I, so you’re in good company. So we have this
Create Captions, I’m going to click on that.
[Presenter clicks on Create Captions]
It’s going to a take a minute because it has to load the video into our
Captions Editor, but a new window is going to come up, and at the very
top of the screen, this black area, this is actually our preview window.
[Presenter moves the arrow over the black area at the top of the screen]
So when I click Play, so again I’m seeing the video, but it’s in a
smaller form.
[Presenter clicks on Play and the video starts running]
And at the bottom down here, I have my captioning window, where I
can create my Captions.
[Presenter moves the arrow over the bottom area of the screen]
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Chapter 12 – Microsoft PowerPoint,
Captions
13:38 mins
15.06.2012
So the first thing I want to do is I want to add a Caption, and I’m going
to select a start time just shortly after the beginning.
[Presenter clicks on Set Start Time, then clicks on Play, the video
commences playing]
OK, so right here I’m going to set my Start Time, and then I’m going
to Play – there’s a section here where there’s music playing, and I’m
going to put captioning that says that there’s music. So I’m going to
listen to the next point where I want to stop.
[Presenter clicks on Play and the video commences playing, then the
Presenter clicks on Pause]
OK, so this where I’m going to set my end point.
[Presenter clicks on Set End Time]
And on here I’m just simply going to say music, so that the music is
playing.
[Presenter enters [MUSIC] in the Caption Text line on the screen]
So I’m going to create a new Caption, because I know that this is
where the Caption starts, or where he starts talking, and so let’s listen
to what he has to say.
[Presenter creates a new line and edits the Start Time, and then clicks
on Play, the video then starts playing. The Presenter then enters data
into the Caption Text field]
[Presenter comments “Is that the rain? All of a sudden I heard this
noise, and I thought I don’t remember that noise”.]
OK, so this is the end point for this clip, so I’m going to set the end
point.
[Presenter clicks on Set End Time]
And I could continue going on, and on, and on, and adding line by line,
but you’ll see now that when I create my Captions, what this is going
to do is layer my captions down at the bottom of the screen.
[Presenter clicks on Create Captions, and the screen goes back to the
PowerPoint Slide showing the video]
Now in this case we will play the video.
[Presenter clicks on Play, and the video starts playing, showing the
changes made to the PowerPoint Slide]
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Chapter 12 – Microsoft PowerPoint,
Captions
13:38 mins
15.06.2012
So you’ll see the Caption appeared at the bottom of the screen. So my
Captions appear. Now a couple of things that – I know this looked
good, but I don’t like it – first that this has wrapped around to the
second line, and I don’t think that that’s very viewable, so what I’m
actually going to do is, these are just text blocks that we’re creating,
and so because they’re just text blocks we can modify them in any way
we want to, just like text.
[Presenter clicks and drags over the text block to highlight it]
So I’m actually going to reduce the font size of this down to, let’s make
to 20 point type, and let’s make this centred.
[Presenter clicks on the font size and changes the size to 20 point type,
and then clicks on the Centre icon in the paragraph menu]
And I also want to, because I know that this top one is a little bit
higher; I can actually align and I can just resize this down to match the
other ones.
[Presenter clicks on Video Tools – Playback – Align Captions]
And so now if we play this, I’ve centred those Captions, and I resized
them so they should fit on the one line.
[Presenter clicks on Play and the video starts playing, showing the
changes the Presenter has made to the PowerPoint Slide]
So we’ve resized it, we’ve centred it. Now one last thing that I don’t
like about this is the fact that those big black text blocks cover up parts
of the screen that may very well be important or visually interesting,
and again because this are text blocks, all I have to do is I just sort of
drag and select, which will select all of them.
[Presenter clicks and drags over the text block]
And if I right click on that block and I go to Format Object, it will take
me to the formatting screen.
[Presenter right clicks on the block, then selects Format Object]
And I’m going to select that I want this to be solid filled, and I want
this to be 50% transparent.
[Presenter selects Solid Fill, then changes the transparency to 50%,
then clicks on Close]
So now when I close this, and we click Play.
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Chapter 12 – Microsoft PowerPoint,
Captions
13:38 mins
15.06.2012
[Presenter clicks on Play and the video starts playing, showing the
changes the Presenter has made to the PowerPoint Slide]
So now you can see that the Caption has the black tile, but it’s also
somewhat transparent so you can see through it. So once I’ve done
this, I’ve done all the editing that I want to around the Captions, once
I’m ready I can actually then because I’ve created my video to be the
size of this current Slide, I can actually export this video. If I go to the
File tab and I click Save As, I can Save As a Windows Media file,
which is just a WMV file.
[Presenter clicks on File – Save As – Save as Type – Windows Media
Video – Save]
And when I select on that it will actually process it, and save as this
entire movie out as a Caption video for the cost of your time.
Previously if you’ve ever done captions before it can be rather time
consuming and expensive to outsource this sort of work, so for small
clips and presentations I find it takes about an hour to do about five
minutes of the video, which isn’t too bad if you consider the
investment in what that can do to that clip for your customers.
So that’s the subtitling editing. Questions about that? Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
No, the only file format that it’ll support currently is PTML. The
question was does it import any other captioning quotes. No, there are
others, and I know there are others, but PTML is currently it’s only an
XML based one that it supports.
Yes?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Yeah, the question is once you’re done can you export as transcripts,
and I don’t believe in the current version you can do that. I know it is a
request that I have heard quite a few times.
[Daniel chuckles]
Because I would love in that Windows, if you could just say save
transcript and it exported a time code and then captioned it. The data’s
there, so it would just be a matter of having them export that data. I
know it’s not there because I’ve asked for it, but it’s something that
may come up in the future.
In regards to that, both the STAMP tool that I just demonstrated, and
the DAISY tool that I spoke about earlier, are both available actually as
open source projects on a website called SourceForge, so for the
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Chapter 12 – Microsoft PowerPoint,
Captions
13:38 mins
15.06.2012
technically inclined all this code is available, that you could go out and
actually create, there was one for agencies that felt like that if they had
something that they need to add, you can actually do that.
Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Yeah, and so you’re making the comment that I was being completely,
that I had no regard to this, that I made it harder for someone who
maybe has a visual disability to see the Captions. And there’s truth to
that, but what I was trying to illustrate here is that there are an infinite
number of ways you can actually adjust the way that these Captions
appear, to best meet the needs of the users that you’re using.
One of the other ways that you can do this is actually make the Slide,
or make the video a little smaller, or make the Slide a little bit bigger,
and actually have the Captions appear underneath the video. So there
are a number of ways.
And your point about usability is, I think, very on point, which is just
because you can do something doesn’t mean that’s the best thing to do,
so just know your customers as best as possible.
Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
It’s an add-on. The question is, is it included PowerPoint already? No,
it’s an add-on, but if you go to the website, it’s on the orange sheet that
I gave you, there’s a link to both the DAISY and the STAMP tools if
you want to download them. They’re free of charge. It takes less than
two minutes to install.
Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
As far as exporting as a DAISY file, or once you’ve created a DAISY
file how it’s…?
[[Question being asked from the audience]
Unfortunately I don’t think Adobe supports to exporting to DAISY.
We worked with a group, a developing group, to create the plug-in for
Microsoft Word, so the plug-in we have is specific for Microsoft Word
documents. But it’s not to say that Adobe might be working on
something like that.
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