Editing Transcripts of Your YouTube Video

CSU Accessibility requirements state that any YouTube video you publish on-line have an accurate transcript of what is being said. If you worked with a script, that's fairly easy to do; just upload the script as a transcript (more on this at the end of the post).

If you don't have a script, it's a bit more difficult. But the job is made much easier by YouTube's own automatic transcription. It will contain many errors (some unintentionally humorous), but the bulk of the transcription will be done, and all you need do is edit the errors.

After you upload your video, go to the Toolbox above the video and choose Captions on the dropdown on the right-hand side (see the figure below).

Click anywhere in the box just below Machine Transcriptions (see figure below).

You'll see a copy of YouTube's transcript. Click the Download button at the bottom (see figure below).

You'll download a file called captions.sbv. It can be opened in Windows Notepad or the free text editing software TextEdit (available here). Make your corrections. Use >> to indicate a change in who is speaking; use brackets to indicate other aural events (e.g. - [applause]). Ignore the numbers; they are timecodes that tell Youtube when to show the text.
Last step: upload the new transcript. Go back to that Captions tab, and this time click the Add New Captions or Transcript (see figure at right).
Make sure you have Caption file chosen (see figure below), then upload your edited transcript. Delete the machine transcription and you're good to go.

One final note: if you already have a script, you can skip to the last step.  Save the transcript as a .txt file and upload it as a Transcript file (see figure above).

Saving PowerPoints as Video

A weird little feature new to the latest version of PowerPoint is that you can save your PowerPoint as a .wmv (Windows Media) video.  Who knew?

The command is somewhat hidden, but if you go to the File menu, choose Save & Send, then Create a Video (a screenshot is at left).  You be given options to choose a screen resolution, choose existing slide timings and narration, set new timings and narration, or give each slide a predetermined amount of time (e.g. 5 seconds).  Click the Create Video button and you're done.  Be aware that long or complex PowerPoints will take some time to render.

If you have a video embedded within your PowerPoint it will automatically play when the presentation gets to that slide.

Below is a very short PowerPoint on Password Protection rendered into a video, with 5 seconds per slide.  

Linking to Specific Spots on a YouTube Video

Most of you know how to link to a YouTube video. You go to the YouTube page and copy the link in the address bar (or, alternately, click Share below the video and copy the link).

What you may not know (and I didn't know til last week) is that you can easily change the link so a video will start at a certain point in the middle of the video. Just click Share, then Options on a video page. The screenshot at left shows the YouTube dialogue box.

You can also simply add #t= and the number of minutes and seconds at the end of the URL. For example, if you wanted to start at 4 minutes and 7 seconds, add #t=4m7s to the end of the URL and you're done!

 In the example link below, I added #t=0m13s to the end of the URL, which will start the video 13 seconds into it, or right before the rocket launches.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/m6nTibKZLFA#t=0m13s

Thanks to Darrin Goodman for the tip.

YouTube Video Editing

Following on the heels of my last post about image stabilization, here is another cool feature of YouTube: you can easily trim the start and end points of any video you upload to YouTube on the fly.

First step: upload the video to YouTube. After it has processed, bring the video up and click Edit. Click Enhancements.



Click Trim.



You'll then get a preview screen, and an area just below it where you can drag the Start and End bars to trim the beginning and end of your video (see below). Play the preview to see your video with the new edits, and fine-tune them until you are happy with the result. Click Done. And that's it. Because the entire video has been uploaded, you can go back and change these edit points, including adding cut portions back into your video, anytime you like.

YouTube Image Stablization

YouTube has added several new user-friendly editing features to its user interface lately, from automatic transcription to editing. Today's post deals with image stabilization.

You can have YouTube automatically stabilize a shaky video. First step: upload the video to YouTube. After it has processed, bring the video up and click Edit.



Next, choose Enhancements at the top of the page.



Click Stabilize. That's it! Be aware the stabilization process will take some time; in my test it took about 20 minutes.

Fall 2011 Connect Schedule

The Fall 2011 series of Connect sessions will deal with two subjects: Working With Websites and Creating Video Podcasts.

On the first Wednesday of every month the Working With Websites sessions will explore the basics of managing a website, and is strongly recommended to those learning to work with the CSU Extension webpage template. Each session will end with a troubleshooting segment, where we open up the session to solving specific web problems and answering questions.

Webpage Template sessions:

• Sept 7: Defining the site in Dreamweaver; Root folders; Making and uploading simple changes
• Oct 5: Adding content (paragraphs, headers, lists, blockquotes); Adding new pages
• Nov 2: SSIs (Server Side Includes): How SSIs work; Manipulating SSIs
• Dec 7: Creating an engaging home page (tables and multimedia)

On the third Wednesday of every month Joane Littlefield and Jeff Wood will hold a series of Connect sessions on Creating Video Podcasts. They will take you through the entire process of creating your own video, from creating your storyboards and recording your narration to editing your video and distributing the final product.

Creating Video Podcasts

• Sept 21: First steps, best practices / Working with titles
• Oct 19: How to shoot / Working with sound
• Nov 16: All about editing
• Dec 14: Distributing your video

All sessions start at 9 a.m. and will last about an hour. Mark your calenders now!

VideoLAN Media Player

The VideoLAN media player (http://www.videolan.org/)is a free, open-source, cross-platform video and audio player that I've been using for close to a year now. It will play most DVDs, virtually all audio CDs, as well as web-friendly formats like Flash and the Windows .wmv format (a complete list is available at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html). It has, in fact, played almost every media file format I've thrown at it, without requiring me to go online and find the applicable codec.

It's fast, and simple. It plays on Windows, Mac and Linux systems. It's a great alternative to Windows Media player, and I've made it my default media player for video and audio on both my personal and work computers.

Give it a try! You can download it here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.

Online Dreamweaver and Photoshop Tutorials

Adobe has thousands of video tutorials up at Adobe TV (http://tv.adobe.com/channel/how-to/), in easy to digest five minute segments.

These tutorials cover the latest versions (e.g. CS4, in most cases) of all the products Adobe offers: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Acrobat, Illustrator, InDesign, Premeire, and lots more. Experience levels range from beginner to advanced. They are well thought out, and well produced.

Embedded below is a tutorial pulled from their site on defining a site on Dreamweaver CS4, the first step in working with any site in Dreamweaver.



Thanks to Darrin Goodman for the tip!

Video and Audio Editing and Converting Tools

AVS4You (http://www.avs4you.com/) offers cheap and easy to use audio and video editing and converting tools. The home page of the site is a little misleading, as the download buttons say "Free download," but the non-activated versions have a watermark in the middle of the screen (shown below), as well as an audio watermark for audio tools. So, you're going to have to pay to get anything useful.



Still, their products are easy to use, and cheap: $39 for a one year subscription to all the tools they offer, and $59 for unlimited access to all their audio and video tools.

The screenshot below shows how simple the video conversion tool is. You select the file you wish to convert, select what format you want to convert it to using the icons at the top, choose a folder and a file name, and click "Convert Now."



The video editing tool is similarly user-friendly. You import video clips, drag them into the time line at the bottom, where you can trim them, add text, transitions, and audio tracks. A screenshot is below.

Embedding Flash and Quicktime Videos

Dreamweaver makes quick work of embedding Flash videos and animation into a webpage. Because Adobe owns Flash, it has a vested interest in getting you to use it.

Go to the Media icon in the insert panel (circled in red on the illustration below), browse to the file, and that's it! You can adjust the size using either the Property Inspector height and width boxes, or by holding down shift and dragging a corner of the video, but sizing the video is best done when you first render it, and not after the fact in Dreamweaver.



Embedding Quicktime video involves a little more work, but not much. Go to the video icon (shown above, circled in red) and choose ActiveX. You'll get an ActiveX icon on the document panel. Go to the Property Inspector below the document panel. Click the "Embed" checkbox (circled in blue below). Browse to the Quicktime video using the file icon to the right of the "Source" box (circled in yellow below). You may need to change the "files of type" box to "all files" in order to see the file. Finally, give Dreamweaver the width and height of the video (circled in black below).



For demonstrations of embedding Quicktime and Flash, as well as demonstrations for embedding slideshows, cellphone videos, and Youtube videos, please come to the Connect session tomorrow, May 20th at 9 a.m. Instructions for attending should be in Monday's email (subject line - Connect session: On-line Video and Presentation Options). Or contact me for more details: jeffrey.wood@colostate.edu.

Squared 5

Squared 5 (http://www.squared5.com/)offers a free download of MPEG Streamclip, a free video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play most movie files; cut, trim and edit MPEG files; and convert them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG formats. MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google. All you need to do is provide the URL of the video.

The Windows version of MPEG Streamclip requires Windows XP or Vista to use.

The Mac version requires at least Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar).

More information, and the downloads, can be found at http://www.squared5.com/

Screentoaster

You can record your computer screen, with narration and a webcam picture, using the free on-line Screentoaster (http://www.screentoaster.com/). It require no download or registration to use. You simply go to the website, click the "Start Recording" button, choose your webcam (if desired), your microphone input, and whether you want to record the entire screen or merely a region. Click Alt + S to start the recording, and Alt + S again to stop it. The result can be downloaded as a .mov or .swf file. If you register with Screentoaster, you can also upload your video to the Screentoaster site or to YouTube (albeit without webcam support), or embed it into a blog or a website, as I've done below.

You can use Screentoaster to record tutorials, Powerpoint presentations, slideshows, anything that can be shown on a computer monitor.

This short sample Screentoaster video shows how to upload a file in Dreamweaver:

Free online screencasting tool

Cam Studio

I've been using Camtasia for years now to record and edit training videos. It's a video screen capture device, so you can record what is happening on your computer screen, and narrate, edit and add titles to the video.

There is a free, open source version of Camtasia called Cam Studio. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Camtasia, but it does has some nice features, like autopan and cursor highlighting. I gave it a test drive yesterday, and it worked quite well (the results are below). I talked to several eXtension agents who have been using it for some time now and were very happy with it.

The recording video output is .avi, but it comes with a tool which easily renders it to Flash video. I've included a video I made with Cam Studio below. It's a tutorial on defining a site in Dreamweaver.

Download Cam studio here. The link will also provide more information about Cam Studio.

Reader Feedback

Several short tech tidbits today.

First, Qik (http://qik.com/), an odd and very interesting little application sent to me by Steve Newman, where you can send a live feed through your cellphone, and then post on the Qik site. Looking through the posted videos, there are lots of family videos (babies, cute kids, sports, etc.) and quite a few folks just talking into their cell phone cameras. But there clearly are useful purposes for this, documenting events as they happen, like speeches, natural disasters, breaking news, auto accidents.

Videos can be easily emailed from the site. It plays well with MySpace, Orkut, and other social networking sites.

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From a NY Times article sent to me by Diana Laughlin, three cool features I didn't know about the Google Search box.

One, it functions as a calculator. Type in 2+2, 2*5, 1021/21, etc, and it will spit out the answer. * performs multiplication, / performs division, "sqrt" calculates square roots, etc.

Two, it functions as a dictionary. Type in "define:" and the word you want to define after the colon, and it will deliver definitions from multiple sources.

Three, it does metric conversion. Type in, say, "13 gallons," and it will return a value of "11.3562354 liters"

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Finally, from Loretta Lohman, a cautionary website called Photoshop Disasters (http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/), an amusing website with a serious mission: documenting obvious Photoshop errors in real life advertisements and photos. Lots of missing limbs and misplaced shadows. My favorite is of Kate Winslet and her husband, where his arm is wearing a sportscoat but the rest of him is not. The educational value here is to increase your awareness of easy mistakes you can make in photo manipulation.