Creating Two Software Videos. One video for a website with subtitles & other for DVD

whiz

Hi Guys,

As mentioned in the title I am thinking of creating two software videos. However I want to run the mechanics in creating these videos by people as some people may have better ideas:


The first video I was going to use Microsoft Expression to record the video in how to demonstrate in how to use the software. After the video was produced, I was going to bring it into Sony Vegas and create subtitles, and then incorporate these into the software video. After this is done I will render the video to a web based format so that people can view it on the web.

The second video, I was going to use Microsoft Expression again to record how to demonstrate in how to use the software. After the video is produced, I was going to bring it into Sony Vegas and rendered it there so that people could watch it on DVD.


Any comments much appreciated

Feathers

Rather than creating two videos, you could create the DVD quality version & then using that bring it into a programme like Handbrake to convert to the webformats.

Regarding subtitles, for handiness sake (and localisation, if that's an issue) I'd consider placing the timestamped script in the page somewhere & using JavaScript to overlay as subtitles. This gives people the benefit of a text-only option & makes the text available for SEO too. Alternatively could use something like Youtube too for subtitled video.

Rendering video takes ages, would avoid doing the same work twice over if you can help it.

whiz

Hi Feathers, thanks for your response, can you please clarify the line below, and how you implement in what you are suggesting. much appreciated for your reply

'' I'd consider placing the timestamped script in the page somewhere & using JavaScript to overlay as subtitles''

Feathers

whiz wrote: »

Hi Feathers, thanks for your response, can you please clarify the line below, and how you implement in what you are suggesting. much appreciated for your reply

'' I'd consider placing the timestamped script in the page somewhere & using JavaScript to overlay as subtitles''

Sorry for the delay getting back. So basically if you're putting video on the web & hosting it yourself (not YouTube/Vimeo/Flickr, etc.), you're probably going to use a 3rd party JavaScript library to handle the video controls — play/pause/volume, etc. & also many of them can detect what's the best format to show videos to your user — going for HTML5 video & then falling back to Flash for older browsers.

One benefit a lot of these libraries give is that they can handle subtitles as a seperate file — this lets users turn them on or off, you could have different languages, etc. To do this though, you would normally create a text file that has a timestamp related to each sentence, telling the player when to show/hide the text.

This 3rd party video library, VideoJS explains it quite well:

VideoJS wrote:

Text Tracks are a function of HTML5 video for providing time triggered text to the viewer. Video.js makes tracks work across all browsers. There are currently five types of tracks:

• Subtitles: Translations of the dialogue in the video for when audio is available but not understood. Subtitles are shown over the video.
• Captions: Transcription of the dialogue, sound effects, musical cues, and other audio information for when the viewer is deaf/hard of hearing, or the video is muted. Captions are also shown over the video.
• Chapters: Chapter titles that are used to create navigation within the video. Typically they're in the form of a list of chapters that the viewer can click on to go to a specific chapter.
• Descriptions (not supported yet): Text descriptions of what's happening in the video for when the video portion isn't available, because the viewer is blind, not using a screen, or driving and about to crash because they're trying to enjoy a video while driving. Descriptions are read by a screen reader or turned into a separate audio track.
• Metadata (not supported yet): Tracks that have data meant for javascript to parse and do something with. These aren't shown to the user.

— http://videojs.com/docs/tracks/

They also link off to a nice looking Microsoft web-based tool for generating these video-synced text files - http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/CaptionMaker/.

There are a few other decent JS video libraries that would take text from the body of your HTML page rather than a seperate file & do the same thing. Can try to dig out links to these again if you're interested.

To get a comprehensive overview on video online, check out Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into HTML 5 Video article. Quite long, but well worth the read.