Automatic Time Stamping with
CPC Closed Captioning Software

Dramatically reduces the time it takes to caption your videos

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About Auto Time Stamp

To caption a video, you need a transcript. Then you need to synchronize, or time stamp, the transcript so that each phrase is displayed at the right time. In the past, synchronizing captions was a labor-intensive, time consuming process. Your options were limited to doing the time stamping yourself, or paying a service on a recurring basis to do it for you.

Now, CPC offers an optional add-on called Auto Time Stamp (ATS) for our post production closed captioning software. This add-on is a huge time saver for organizations who need to caption a large volume of videos for which transcripts are available. Automatic time stamping won't always be as accurate as a human being, but since it identifies potential problem areas in the file, you can achieve the accuracy of a human being without the tedium of manually timing the entire video. This can also help you quickly identify any discrepancies in the transcript.

ATS works very well for videos such as (but not limited to): speeches, lectures, presentations, meetings, training videos, etc. which have clean audio. It does not work as well if the audio has already been mixed with music or sound effects, so it is isn't recommended for captioning dramatic content, music videos, or videos with lots of background noise or low fidelity audio, such as telephone or VoIP recordings.

Requirements

• An accurate transcript.
• A video with a high quality audio track (i.e. good signal-to-noise ratio).
• CaptionMaker or MacCaption software with ATS add-on
• See our System Requirements page for minimum computer specs

Results

• Automatically synchronizes each caption; no need to manually time stamp captions. (This labor-saving option takes MacCaption's and CaptionMaker's existing feature of automatically breaking unformatted text into captions to the next level of automation).
• The process is much faster than real-time (15 times to 30 times faster, depending on the speed of your computer).
• The software automatically detects captions with poor synchronization and highlights them in red, so you can spot check and manually correct these captions if you so choose.

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How to get Auto Time Stamp

Auto Time Stamp is an add-on with a yearly subscription. If you already own CaptionMaker or MacCaption, please Contact Us to upgrade your key. You can try Auto Time Stamp in demo mode (max of 25 lines) before you upgrade.

If you don't already own our software, Auto Time Stamp is available for all versions of CaptionMaker and MacCaption complete closed captioning software. Please see our Products Page to learn more about our closed captioning software.

Auto Time Stamp is also available in the demo versions for both CaptionMaker and MacCaption.

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How to use Auto Time Stamp

• CaptionMaker with ATS - How it works (pdf) - Video tutorial 
  Java runtime (JRE 1.6) is required. Download here: Java JRE for Windows

• MacCaption with ATS - How it works (pdf) - Video tutorial 
  Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) users please see this note.

• Two sample files: Video and Transcript you can use to play with ATS, even in demo mode (right click and select Save As to download)
  

Range selection feature: Video Tutorial

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Best Practices & Troubleshooting

• An accurate transcript is vital. To get good results, the transcript cannot deviate significantly from the audio.
• High quality audio is also the key. Compression, sound effects or music can distort the sound.
• Speaker IDs that are indicated with >> Name: will be treated as unspoken text.
• Non-verbal information, such as music or sound effect indications, should be enclosed by brackets like this: [MUSIC], or [Applause.]
• If the Auto Time Stamp menu item is grayed out, make sure you have loaded the video/audio file and the transcript into our software, as both are required. (If you use Mac OSX Leopard 10.5, and it is still grayed out, see this note.)
• If the software highlights some caption lines as low confidence, you might want to do a quick AutoSync to spot check these sections. In many cases the low confidence sections may be fine or close enough for your needs. If not, you can do a manual time stamp just on these few sections to improve the alignment.
• If your dialogue is interspersed with musical segments or long periods of noise, you can use the Range Selection feature to mark time codes around the noise, and run ATS on just the dialogue segments.
• As of August, 2011, Auto Time Stamp supports English language audio only.

This software may use code of FFmpeg licensed under the LGPLv2.1 and its source can be downloaded here