Do I create the subtitles myself or order a service?

With HAMK’s supported tools, you can caption your videos either manually or automatically. The subscriber of the video is responsible for the subtitles of the video and their accuracy. You can also buy captioning as a service from Lingsoft

If you want to learn more about the legal basis of video captions, see the article Act on the provision of digital services promotes the accessibility of the videos and audio files

Use auto-captions when:

• typos in captions are allowed
• you have time to check the captions and correct the necessary parts
• you need usable captions for your video quickly
• the sound quality of the video is good

Use manual captions when:

• the video is short
• you have the speech of the video as a transcribed text file
• the video includes special vocabulary and acronyms
• the sound quality is weak

Order captions/subtitles as a service when:

• there are no human resources or time to do captioning
• high quality and accessible captions are needed for the publication channel
• translated subtitles are needed for the speech in the video
• special captions are needed for the speech in the video (captions for the hearing impaired)

Making captions with self-supported tools

Word Online

Word Online’s transcription tool allows you to automatically convert speech to text. It can transcribe speech or pre-recorded audio files in real time. The tool can be found in the Dictate menu on the Home tab.

Watch the three-minute video tutorial äänitiedoston muuntamisesta tekstiksi Wordn avulla (Kaltura, HAMK internal, with english captions)

Kaltura

The Kaltura video service allows you to make captions both automatically and manually.

You can also order an automatically created caption file for the video if your video has been uploaded to HAMK’s Kaltura video service at  kaltura.hamk.fi.

The price of captioning is €6.5 per hour. You’ll not receive invoice after the order is complete, the costs are divided per unit.

1. Log in to the kaltura.hamk.fi –video service and select the video to be subtitled. Click the actions drop-down menu open and select Caption & Enrich.

2. Under Source Media Language, select the language spoken in the video. After that, press the Submit button and the order will be processed. The average delivery time for finished captions is 30 min.

3. In the Status column of the Existing Requests section, you can check whether the captions order has been completed.

4. The finished caption will appear in the Captions menu of the video, accessible from the Actions drop-down menu (Edit).

5. The automatically generated captions are displayed in the Captions menu:

   1. Set as Default – here you select which of the captions (if there are many caption files) will be shown to the user by default when playing the video.

   2. Edit – editing the caption data fields (language, label, accuracy).
   3. Delete – deletion of the caption file from Kaltura
   4. Download – download the caption file from Kaltura to your computer
   5. Show On Player – this determines whether captions can be selected from the video’s subtitle (cc) menu
   6. Edit Captions – caption file editing (text correction and timestamp editing)

You can also create an empty caption file in Kaltura and caption the video manually.

1. Click Create New Captions

2. Caption language and accuracy – options (Language and Accuracy) are for your own record keeping and help to distinguish between caption files of the same video. The value entered in the Label field is visible to the video viewer as a caption selection in the CC (closed captions) menu at the bottom of the video.

3. Functions of the caption editor:
   1. Select which caption file you are editing.
   2. Here you can enter a word or term that is transcribed incorrectly in the subtitles. In the Replace with field, you enter the correct word or term. After pressing the Replace button, the text sections are automatically corrected
   3. The name of the speaker can be entered automatically in front of the selected captions (check box to the left of the time stamps).
   4. Entering time stamps (when the speech starts and ends) and text. Time stamps are entered in the format hh:mm:ss:ms (hours:minutes:seconds:milliseconds)
   5. The Plus button inserts an empty text field.

4. The Save button saves the changes made to the caption. The changes are canceled with the Revert button.

Clipchamp

Microsoft Clipchamp is an easy-to-use video editing tool included in HAMK’s M365 environment. With Clipchamp, you can add subtitles to your video as files or using automatic speech recognition, edit the resulting subtitles, and save the subtitles as a separate SRT file for export to a publishing platform.

Windows users can find Clipchamp by searching the Start menu by typing Clipchamp in the search box. Mac users can access Clipchamp in a browser by signing in to their organization’s M365 account, opening the application menu, and selecting Clipchamp.

Watch Microsoft’s tutorial video on how to add subtitles to a video with Clipchamp.

ScreenPal

ScreenPal makes it easy to create screenshot videos, edit them and produce captions. See the digipedagogical article for creating an account to service.

ScreenPal tutorial video on how to add captions.

ScreenPal tutorials.

Youtube

You can produce captions and/or subtitles for a video uploaded to Google’s YouTube service. Youtube is an application supported by HAMK. Youtube instructions on how to add subtitles to a video.

Subtitle Edit

Subtitle Edit is an open source captioning tool for Windows users, that you can install from the Software center. The tool is useful in the following cases, among others:

1. The file format needs to be changed.
2. There are errors in the timing of the caption file, for example some captions do not appear on the screen or the captions appear in the wrong place on the screen.

Automatic captioning with Whisper

Please note that the first time it takes time to download the language model. Subtitling can also take time, but this is completely dependent on the machine’s efficiency.

Learn more about utilizing the Subtitle Edit program in producing and editing subtitles in this digipedagogical training video (Kaltura, HAMK internal).

If you need help fixing a problem, please submit a ticket to the HAMK Helpdesk