Closed Captioning

Truth: I spent 38 years of my life not thinking much about closed captioning. I guess I always appreciated the captioning at the Doctor's office, so I didn't have to listen to whatever trashy daytime TV they had on...that was pretty much the extent of my relationship with CC.

A couple of years ago, Ellis and I made a movie of ourselves telling about an experience for our Stake Women's Conference. At this point Marriner was serving as the High Council representative for the Branch, and we'd been to the branch once or twice. So we showed up to the conference, and the interpreter asks, "Does the movie have captions?" I was like, uhhhh....no, I didn't even think of that. And I don't even know how I would go about doing that. I sorta feel like a lame-o for inclusion and technical capabilities.... Out loud I just said, "Oh, no, I'm sorry."

Fast forward to my 3rd week in the Branch, and I was substitute teaching Sunday School for the teenagers. The church had a great movie that went along with the lesson...but it didn't have captions. By now I know that YouTube can do auto-captions, but YouTube is blocked in the church building (along with several other distracting websites) so that didn't work. I tried for days to find a way to play that movie with captions, and finally gave up. No A/V for our lesson :(

This week, captions came back into my life when Marriner asked his wife and kids if they wouldn't like to have a fun little Sunday afternoon service project. Of course, the answer was yes :) He'd been sent some training videos that he needed to share with some people in the branch and guess what...no captions. Would we like to try figuring out how to add captions?

It turns out that captions are really, really, really easy on YouTube. (The part of me that passed AP English just searched for alternatives to "really, really, really" in my brain...super easy? amazingly-beyond-your-imagination easy?) Here's how it goes: you upload a video. Don't set any special settings for captions, just upload like normal. Then come back 20 minutes later, and auto-captions will have shown up. And they're pretty impressive! So then you can go into the video settings and edit the captions. They have a caption editor that plays the movie, and when you start typing, it pauses until you're done. And basically all I had to edit was adding periods and commas. It really did a fabulous job of recognizing words!

We probably spent 2 hours on the captioning, including time to figure out what I was doing. It's probably good it didn't take any more time than that, because we all had lots of opportunities for extra service on Sunday, and nobody did much sitting around wishing for something to do :) Those are the best Sundays, anyway.

So next time you're making a movie, go ahead and add captions! It's not so hard, and it makes the world a better place!