Otter.ai
Otter.ai is a tool that can help with creating SRT files for captioning. Contact Distance Education to use a SAC Otter.ia Pro account.
- You can import your video files or record your voice, and as you speak it will create the caption file for your audio. With these files, you can then upload them into the YouTube editor, or, if it is a non-owned video, you can upload the captions into Amara. The SRT files have timestamps and will automatically sync the captions to the video. This tool is much faster than having to manually caption a video from scratch! You can edit the captions with any corrections that need to be made to the spelling in Otter.ai! Otter.ai is pretty good about adding in punctuation. Otter.ai will require the least editing.
- Suggested Usage: Your own longer videos or non-owned videos
- Steps: Create caption file in Otter.ai, upload to your YouTube video, or upload to Amara for non-owned video.
- Turn around time: Check out temporary license from Distance Education and start right away!
- Caption accuracy: Most accurate with good punctuation, limited editing needed for misspelled words
3C Media
3C Media Solutions offers captioning of instructional videos for free to faculty and staff of the California Community Colleges System.
- Create a free account to get started! 3C Media accounts are available to California Community Colleges faculty and staff only. You must register using your SAC email address. Once submitted, the videos are captioned within 1 week. Note: With 3C Media, you will still need to edit after captioning and correct any spelling mistakes and correct punctuation. 3C Media will require the more editing than Otter.ai.
- Suggested Usage: For non-owned videos
- Steps: Submit video link to 3C Media, review/edit, link out to edited 3C Media video file.
- Turn around time: Once you submit, the turn around time will be around 1 week.
- Caption accuracy: Not as accurate as Otter.ai with more editing required for misspelled words.
YouTubeYouTube creates automatically generated captions for all uploaded
videos. However, YouTube does not add punctuation and requires more
corrections than Otter.ai.
- Allow enough time for YouTube automatic captions to be created. This depends on the length of your video. It could be time for a cup of coffee, or overnight for longer videos.
- Suggestion Usage: For your own short videos
- Steps: Upload Video onto YouTube, let YouTube auto-generate captions, edit punctuation and misspelled words.
- Turn around time: At your own convenience, YouTube usually takes less than a day to generate captions.
- Caption accuracy: Fairly accurate. YouTube generated captions will require the most editing since it does not capture punctuation and may have misspelled words
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