Creating video captions in Flash CS4

Get accessible by creating captions for video using Flash and the Timed Text caption standard

Flash video has become the undisputed rich media format for the web, thanks mainly to sites such as YouTube, BBC iPlayer and Hulu adopting the Flash Video Format because of its quality-to-size ratio.
Flash sometimes, unfairly, gets a lot of stick for being inaccessible and while that can be the case for some websites, it is leading the way for creating accessible video on the web. The standard for captioning is the timed text format, an XML file whose contents include captions, but more important the timecode of when to display the captions and for how long.
This is perfect for anyone wanting to create accessible video content for those with hearing problems and is also a useful addition to any educational use of video. After all, it will only serve to reinforce the message if it is displayed on screen while being spoken. In this tutorial we will look at just how easy it is to add captions with an XML file and Flash CS4.

Download the tutorial files for this project by visiting here

01 Starting off

From the cover CD drag the Start folder to your desktop. Inside here you will notice that there are two files, one is a QuickTime movie file and the other is an XML file that contains the necessary captions. When we create any other files for this tutorial, they must all be saved into this specific folder.

02 Open the movie

Double-click on the file “caption_demo.mov” to open
in QuickTime. If you hit the Play button you will hear around 15 seconds of audio being spoken, this audio will need to be typed into the “captions.xml” file along with the timecode that the captions are displayed on the screen for.

03 Open the XML

Open the file “captions.xml” in either a text editor or Dreamweaver. You will notice the XML file has a TT on the second line, this stands for timed text format that is a standards-based way of displaying captions for video on the web. Notice also that line 11 has the beginning timecode and duration of the caption text.

04 Add the captions

With the video open side-by-side with the XML file, listen to each phrase of audio, noting the start time and how long it takes to say those words. In your XML file, copy line 11 and paste it, then add further captions. The timecode is in a HH:MM:SS:Millisecond format, as shown in the example above.

05 Save the captions

After a few minutes you should have added all the captions. As you can see this video is only 15 seconds long, but still requires a reasonable amount of work to get the captions just right. Once you have completed the captions, they should look similar to above so save the file but do not close it down as we will add to this later.

Pages: 1 2 3