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Kaltura (Captioning) - Adding and Editing Captions
The University of Wisconsin System (except for UW Madison) Kaltura instance provides a machine captioning system for videos, at no charge to the user. Owners or co-editors can request machine-generated captions for their Kaltura videos from within My Media. Machine-generated captions often require manual cleanup before the quality is high enough to meet accessibility standards, so Kaltura also provides tools for video owners or co-editors to edit the captions on their videos.
Requesting Machine Captions
Here is how you request machine-generated captions for your videos:
1) Go to Kaltura's "My Media"
1a) In Canvas, go to Canvas > Account > My Media.1b) In Mediaspace, go to Guest > Login, then [Your Name] > My Media.
2) In My Media, select a video from your list of videos.
3) In the drop-down menu below the preview of the video, click Actions > Caption & Enrich.
4) Under Order Captions, select:
- Service: Machine
- Source Media Language: English [or other language, as needed]
- Feature: Captions.
5) Click Submit.
The resulting screen will show you all of your previous captions requests for that video. You can get back to this Captions Requests screen by going to Actions > Caption & Enrich.
6) When the captions have been generated, the "CC" button to turn on caption display will automatically appear in the video player anywhere that the video is embedded or posted (even existing embeds or shares).
Editing Machine Captions
Machine-generated captions often require manual cleanup before the quality is high enough to meet accessibility standards. Here is how you edit your videos' machine-generated captions:
1) Go to Kaltura's "My Media"
1a) In Canvas, go to Canvas > Account > My Media.
1b) In Mediaspace, go to Guest > Login, then [Your Name] > My Media.
2) In My Media, select a video from your list of videos.
3) In the drop-down menu below the preview of the video, click Actions > Caption & Enrich.
4) On the Captions Requests screen, click the pencil (Edit) icon to edit your captions.
5) On the Closed Captions Editor screen, you can make changes and correct errors in the machine-generated captions. Common errors include garbled words, typos, and incorrect proper names.
For detailed instructions on using the Closed Captions Editor, see Kaltura's How to Edit Captions video, starting around the 0:50 second mark:
Key features of the Closed Captions Editor include:A: Search and Replace
Search for specific text strings within the caption file. Use Replace to swap out one text string for another throughout the captions file.B: Add Speaker
Lets you designate who is speaking during a particular section of the captions. To add a speaker, check the box next to one (or several) caption sections in the Content Editor (below), then type a name in the Add speaker to selected items field and click Add.C: Timestamp and Content Editor
This is the heart of the Closed Captions Editor. Use this to edit each chunk of text in the captions and determine when that chunk of captions will be displayed. If you create timestamps which overlap, the editor will highlight the overlapping timestamps.D: Video Preview
Lets you play and pause the video as you're editing captions. Checking Autoscroll will cause the captions sections in the Content Editor (above) to scroll as the video plays.
6) Once you've made the edits you want, click Save.
Please note: captions changes may take up to 24 hours to show up in Canvas or Mediaspace.
Adding Captions from External Sources
You can also upload captions files which were created outside of Kaltura (manually created or created by a 3rd party vendor such as 3Play, for example).
A video owner or co-editor can upload externally-created captions files by following these steps:
1) Go to Kaltura's "My Media"
1a) In Canvas, go to Canvas > Account > My Media.
1b) In Mediaspace, go to Guest > Login, then [Your Name] > My Media.
2) In My Media, select a video from your list of videos.
3) In the drop-down menu below the preview of the video, click Actions > Edit.
4) On the Edit screen, click the Captions tab, then Upload Captions File.
5) Select a captions file from your computer.
6) Enter the label text which will appear on the Captions menu in the video player: "English" or "Spanish," for example.
7) Click Save.