Using the Caption Editor

In this topic you will learn how to edit captions using the caption editor.

Captions can be added to videos and provide additional or interpretive information to individuals who wish to access it. Captions are associated with videos as part of the Text Track properties. Beacon provides the ability to auto-generate captions for a video or captions can be manually associated with videos.

Once captions have been added to videos, the caption editor can be used to edit the caption files. The text tracks properties can be configured to provide captions for a video.

Opening the caption editor

To open the caption editor, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Media module.
  2. Click a video name to open the video properties page.
  3. Icons above the preview player can be used to display the preview player or the caption editor. Click the CC icon to open the caption editor.

The first text track will be loaded into the editor. If there are no text tracks, the editor will be empty.

Editing a caption file

To edit a caption file, follow these steps:

  1. Open the caption editor.
  2. The caption editor will load the first text track into the editor. If you need to edit a different text track, click Choose text track ˇ and select the text track to edit. The editor will display the tracks and the associated start and end times.
  3. Edit the text track content as needed. The preview player can be used to preview changes to the text track.
  4. Click Publish text track to save the changes. Beacon will upload the updated text tracks file.

Generating captions

The caption editor can be used to generate captions for a video. To generate captions for a video, follow these steps.

  1. Open the caption editor.
  2. Click Auto caption.
  3. Select the Language to generate the captions in. If a Language is not selected, the video language is auto-detected. Selecting a language will improve the caption file generation time and may improve overall accuracy.
  4. Enter a Label. The label is typically set to the language used in the video. The label will be displayed in the CC dropdown in the video player and will be used by viewers to select the captions to be displayed.
  5. Click Done.

The page will need to be refreshed when the captions are complete for them to populate in the caption editor. The generated captions will have a Published status after they are generated.

Saving drafts

When a caption file is saved as a draft, it will not be displayed to viewers. Drafts are useful when you are in the process of editing or reviewing a caption file. To save a caption file as a draft, open caption editor and click Save draft. The caption editor will display a status of Draft.

Known issues and feature gaps

Because the caption Editor is not yet a finished feature, there are some known issues/feature gaps that you may want to be aware of. These are listed below and will be resolved in the coming weeks.

  • Publish and Unsave workflow - We recognize that it is not ideal to have to publish a text track and then unpublish separately to hide the captions from end viewers. We are working on making this a single action.
  • Overlapping captions - If one caption has a start time with the same timecode as the previous caption’s end time, they will appear to overlap in the caption player. It will not appear that way to end viewers - the caption line with the same start timecode will win the conflict.
  • Timecode errors - Only numbers and colons are allowed in the timecode field. If you enter in any other character-types (e.g. letters, commas), it will result in an error. To fix this, replace the disallowed characters with a number or colon.