Flash Article

Captioning Flash video with Captionate and the captioning-supported FLVPlayback component skins

Transcribing your video

The first step to captioning your Flash video is to create a transcript in digital format. Type your transcript into a text file using a carriage return to delimit each caption. You can use Flash-compatible HTML tags to style your text or to add a line break within a caption; for example:

<p><i>( whispering ): </i><br/>Quiet please.</p>

Transcribe all dialog and any meaningful sound effects, such as a door knocking or a telephone ringing, in your video. You can use Unicode characters in your transcript.

While Captionate provides a data structure for defining an array of the speakers in your caption tracks, it may make sense to indicate changes in speaker in the transcript file (as in the following example), so that the file can be used for a plain-text transcript as well:

<p><i>( speaking French ): </i><br/><b>George:
    </b> Bonjour, Marie.</p>

<p><b>Marie: </b> Bonjour, George.</p>

<p>Voilà une sucette.</p>

<p><b>George: </b> C'est pour moi?</p>

<p><b>Marie: </b> Oui, c'est pour toi.</p>

<p><b>George: </b> Merci, Marie!</p>

<p><b>Marie: </b> De rien, George.</p>

To learn more about conventions in captioning and how to format your transcript, you may find helpful the Suggested Style Guide provided by the Caption Center of the Media Access Group at WGBH-TV, the public television station in Boston, Massachusetts.

Page 2 of 8

Previous Page

Next Page