CADET, NCAM's New Caption and Description Editing Tool
So welcome everyone to, accessibility. New York City this is our, first meetup of 2018. Great. To have so many people in. Attendance, tonight. Our. Goal, and one of the things we strive to do is to have you, know a high-tech, live stream Meetup, where we have live. Captioning. In, real, time as we present my. Name is Thomas Logan I'm one of the organizers of the, meetup here I'd. Love to have, time to get to know some of you although this might be your first meet up, after. The meeting or the presentations. Today we've. Got our our meetup URL, the. YouTube URL so the presentation, tonight we. Do keep, the archive of all of the presentations. From our meetings and, we have the captions. Associated. With, the videos and, the trainings, that we. Have here and it's, a great resource just, to be able to go back over the last few years of what the. Meetup has had a lot, of great speakers I. Want. To quickly thank our sponsors, we have, level, access, who has been, for pretty, much our existence, providing. Sponsorship. For the communication. Access real-time, translation, z'. That we have. I want to thank Internet Society New. York chapter this is jolly McPhee in the back that gives us our great, high-quality stream. That's out there live, thanks. To the New York Public Library who's hosting us in this event space tonight the Andrew Andrew, high school library. White. Coat captioning, has been our, provider. For providing, the text. Translations, that we see up on the screen, equal. Entry is my company, and we. Focus on getting this event organized and happening on time and our. New sponsor, tonight is IRA. So in our quest, to continue. To innovate and, do new things with technology we're. Very excited to. Begin. Working. With this idea of IRA which is a new technology to provide audio descriptions. Live. In, a real environment so. Just, beginning, to explore, this concept we. Marty, Watts here, tonight who be, available to talk, after the Meetup and we're also planning to have a. Meetup, after, this event to, get more in depth on this technology, but it's very exciting technology. And we appreciate the sponsorship. Basically. At this event someone, who has signed, up for the service to receive audio descriptions. Of the visuals, or visual information that's occurring will. Be able to get those audio. Descriptions, for free at, our event so we appreciate that. Last. Piece before a presentation so, we haven't met in a while but it's super, exciting here in New York City the access, plus ability, exhibit at the cooper-hewitt, museum you. Know for all of us have to come here we're very interested, hopefully. In technology. And how, technology and, design, can. Change. People's lives and so this exhibit is all, of this really interesting. Technology for. And. Designs, for providing, solutions, for people with disabilities, I believe. It's going to be in New York City until September, of this, year so, you have a good amount of time to make it out there but figured. I just went this weekend, blew. Me away awesome, technology's, awesome, stuff to learn from it's a great exhibit so, just, wanted to share that with the group if, you haven't heard about it it's, access, plus ability. So. With. That said I'm now going to be handing it over to our presenters for, the evening then. The National Center for.
Accessible. Media, and, the, WGBH. You, know they have been pioneers and, working in this space you know from at least when I started, working, accessibility. I remember, using their, software 15, years ago Mac. PI looking. At how to provide captions, you know and that was a tool that I used. Back then very, excited, tonight to learn about their new, software, and learn about new, features new ways to make media. Accessible. And with that I'm gonna hand it over to Donna one of our guests tonight thank. You good. Evening everyone can you hear me okay. My name is Donna Danielewski I'm, the director of the, Center, for accessible media at. WGBH, Educational, Foundation and, I'm, so grateful for the opportunity to present here tonight so thank you Thomas and everyone. For helping to organize this event I'm. Here with my team today and we'll be talking a little bit about our, free. Software, cadet the caption and description editing. Tool and, providing. A bit of training for you the, software. As you will hear many times today is free. Check. It out on our website download it play around with it there's, a, support. Group online as well for you to ask any questions, there and we're. Just thrilled we're thrilled at the opportunity to, have been able to create it for you and to share it with you and I. Don't, want to go too far since I know we got a bit of a late start I'm gonna be quiet now and introduce you to my two colleagues, who will be taking you through tonight's presentation, I have Jeff freed and Bryan Gould and I'm not sure who's speaking first okay and so. That wasn't so smooth, let, me juice you too Jeff freed thank you very much. Until. I, deliver, the goods, my. Apologies, to people standing. Behind me I'll be, working on a computer sideways, so at some points my back will be to you my, name is Jeff freed I'm here with Bryan Gould and, we're. Going to be showing, you, at. A sort of high-level how, our new, captioning, and description tool. Called cadet works as Donna said it's free and, there. Are a lot of good things about it but first for those of you who aren't familiar with end cams work I want to give you just a two minute overview of who we are and. Cam was. Born. In 1991, at the WGBH, Educational, Foundation in, Boston that's the same WGBH, that you know if you watch public TV it was no public radio but, our history. Of accessibility, actually, goes back to 1971, which is when we founded the caption Center and invented. Captions, for broadcast TV so, all of the captioning, technology that you see here tonight and that you see on TV and in movies is, rooted, in Boston, at WGBH, in the early 1970s, so we have a very long history. In. Accessibility, in 1990. WGBH. Launched, a new service called discrete to video service, or DVS. And. For, those of you who are familiar with audio descriptions, WGBH. Was, a pioneer, in audio. Description for broadcast, television and so. You'll be seeing Brian talked a lot about descriptions, in the description, half of cadet tonight. Too Thomas. Mentioned magpie, which was the original free. Do-it-yourself, online, captioning tool that we released around 2000. And magpie. Was, a, tool. That could be used to write captions for online purposes, and, you. Know magpie, was a great tool but it got a little long in the tooth and fell behind the times and so with some funding, that we got from the Massachusetts, Attorney General's, Office we. Redeveloped. Magpie, into something called cadet and. That is what we will be talking about tonight. Cadet. Is a browser-based. Caption, editor and audio description, editor, it. Runs on the Mac it runs on Windows I'm told it runs in Linux but Linux scares me so I don't use Linux, but. People, say it works fine there so I'll take their word for it. Because, it runs in a browser. It. Uses, HTML, because it uses HTML, we can write the. Software itself, the application, to take advantage of all the accessibility, stuff, that is built into HTML. And other kinds of markup so. If you are a keyboard, user if you're a screen reader user or, a user of some assistive technology, you, will be able to use magpie as well. I'm. Sorry cadet yeah I am I'm. Glad that happened earlier I make this mistake all the time I was involved, in the development of magpie, almost.
20 Years ago and it's it's, it's an old habit so when I say magpie Brian will say cadet. Thank you all, right um. Cadet. Is used for writing what, we sometimes call pre produced or offline captions. This is a tool to write captions. For, a programming, that is already, produced this is not for live captioning that takes a whole different, skill set on the part of the captioner, and a, whole different technology. Set too so. Magpie can be used to write captions, and descriptions for. Pre-produced, material, or offline material, I'm gonna walk you through the captioning, half and when I'm done Brian's gonna walk you through the description. Half and, I encourage. You all to ask questions, as we go along rather than save them up till, the end we've got about 50 minutes so if you've got questions. Raise. Your hand otherwise I'm just like an out-of-control train which, is probably not the thing to say given, what this happen. Okay. What, we have on the screen now is a. Completed. Captioning. Project, and by completed, I mean this, is a project that. Contains. A, video that, I want to caption and it. Contains. Captions. That I wrote. Magpie. Is made up of three. Components. Okay. Okay. I'm. Sorry I'm not doing that I'm perfect cadet is. That where you should. Yeah. I'm sorry and I apologize to the captioner over. Here we have a media player so this is where the video is going to play in cadet. Over. Here we have the editor and this, is where you. Will type, captions, or write captions and do. Some other things like time. The captions, and, then. Down below which, is covered right now by the captioning, window is is, a little status, area where you can see, error messages, or progress, messages, and things like that. Yes. Question. She, can't follow the instructions on the website. In. The. Okay. So you're. Not able to I. See. Okay okay, why, don't we talk afterward, I know the guy who wrote the manual so. I'll. I'll. Go through that with you. He's. A nice guy okay so. What we have here in our finished caption project, is, the. Text, over. Here the captions, and the video and what I'm going to do now is I'm just to, show you what the finished project looks like I'm going to show you the. Captions, playing in. The video player and then I'll show you how it's done so. We'll just run this quickly. You. Know how frustrating, it is trying to help your kids when they're sick. Pause. It right there. Okay. So on the screen what we saw were, captions, playing, over, the video. And. Those captions were the same text, that we, can see in the caption editor. What. I'll do now is I'll, erase. All the work and then, we'll go through the steps that are involved in creating, captions and as we go along ask.
Questions. Magpie. The, cadet can't, see I caught myself, cadet. Can, caption. Videos. Of. Just about any format so. If you're a video, producer, or if you have a library videos that need to be captioned. Mp4, is always the happiest, format but there are other formats that cadet. Can handle as well just about any format that will play in your browser, meaning. If you use Safari, or Firefox or. Chrome or, Internet Explorer. On Mac or Windows. Cadet. Will handle, whatever format that is most, people use mp4. These days okay, so. The first thing you need to do in order to write. Captions is, open. A video. So we will add a video to. Cadet. And here's the video. The. Same one we just looked at. Okay. No. Caps, hey. It's. Funny we see captions, here all, right well let's. Let's. Quit, and restart I. Don't know why that happened. Okay. Let's try it again. Of. Course it worked fine in the hotel room. Okay. So, let's. Try it again. Yes. Good. Question, if. If you are selecting, a video to caption, the. Video should live on your computer it should be local which, is actually a. Nice, feature about Magpies, that you don't need to be connected to the Internet in order to use it which, is kind, of a nice privacy thing for one thing if you're in an academic setting, that can be important but. Also it means that you can download a bunch of videos on your computer and then take a long flight and caption, them. Or. Any offline, situation. Once. You write, the captions, you can then send. The caption, file to YouTube, or Vimeo or, any other hosting service or you know use it in your own player. Ok. Ok. So now we have a video loaded, into cadet. Ok. There. We go. And. So, now we need to write. Now. We need to write some captions, ok. There. Are several ways to enter caption. Text into, cadet the, most obvious way is that you can type directly. Into the editor in the way that you do that is by playing. The video for, a few seconds, stopping, typing, playing stopping, typing ok, one, nice feature about cadet, is that you can play. It at slower and faster speeds, so, you, can slow, it down. Which. Is probably not the thing to do it 6 o'clock at night. So. We could type that. And. So forth okay, after, you type one. Block of captions, if you hit the Enter key twice a, new.
Row Will, appear on the screen and, you can type and. Then. You can go enter, enter and type some more okay. And. Type, some more, this. Is a perfectly valid way to enter, captions, into magpie but as you can see it might be a little tedious you might be kind of slow cadet. Sorry and, magpie, - it was the same thing. But, there, are faster, ways to do it okay a. Faster, way to do it let's clear. Out, what we just did. Okay. Get, rid of everything a. Faster. Way to do it is actually to transcribe. The audio of, your video using. A word processor, like TextEdit, or BBEdit or. Even. Word as long as you save, the, file as a text file. And. I did that ahead of time using. An. Application called BB edit which is just a plain text editor. You, can type, your entire, script, into, this text editor and if. You put an extra, blank. Row between, each, block, of captions, cadet. Will understand, that to mean. Each. One of these little blocks of text will go into one of those cells in the editor so, if, you, insert these extra, rows or double carriage returns between each caption. When. You, open. The file when you import. That. File. Into. Cadet. It. Looks like this which is a fully typed. Out caption. Caption. Project, okay so all of the caption text for this video was. Transcribed. Outside. Of cadet, and imported, this is this is a much faster way to do it this, also means that if you used a speech-to-text, application. Like Dragon NaturallySpeaking you, can transcribe, perhaps. By re speaking the. Audio into, dragon, clean. Up the transcript, and then, imported. Into magpie you can use YouTube if, you like to use YouTube to create. Auto captions, but not upload, the but not use just Auto captions, in their natural state because, they're, not very accurate he, said bitterly. You, can download the, transcript, from YouTube. Cleaned. It up a magpie. Cadet. And send. It back to YouTube, okay. Demerit. I know I'm having, a rough night okay. So. Now we have all the caption text in the editor we're. We. Now have the text but we have no way to display. The. Text with, the video, that's because captions, require, timing. Information that. Instruct. The captions when to appear on the screen and when to disappear, okay, and, cadet. Will do that for you too it's um we, like to think a straightforward operation. The. Way that it works is. You. Play the video and you listen to the video and when. You hear, the, words spoken, that correspond, to the first caption or in this case the first sound effect which is women sneezing, you. Press a key which. In cadet is control. Hold, down the control key and just press the comma and you. Will see a timecode at that instant, enter, the start column, which, represents, when, the caption should start its display, and, then. Cadet. Will, the, little green focus, will. Move, down. To. The next caption and sort of arm itself, for the next key press and when.
You Press. Control. Comma. And. So, forth okay, and. I'll show you how that works now. I'm. Gonna have to put down the mic because my hand. Is not what. Actually it is big enough but I. Don't want to take the chance so I'm gonna put down the mic and I will speak loudly as I do this so here we go I'm gonna play the video and watch. The time codes in the start column we'll go through this video it's about one minute long. We. Should. Pick up the speed. You. Know how frustrating, it is trying to help your kids when they're sick a. Visit. To the doctor's, office can, be a challenge. No. I don't want you to take my temperature no. And. You should feel better. Your. Parents. You, want to help make your child feel better, as fast as possible. It's. Tempting, to think that antibiotics. Are the answer, when your child is sick but. That may not always be the case you. Don't look so good. A lot. Of illnesses, can be caused by viruses. And antibiotics. Don't work on viruses in. Fact. Antibiotics. Are strong, medicines. That can have serious, side effects. Okay. That's. About one minute of captioning, okay and because, I of course have seen this video a few times. I'm. Able to anticipate when. It, depress, the, the timing command, I, always. Advise people if you're gonna be captioning, a video especially, for the first time. Watching. It ahead of time or at least watch five. Minutes of it so that when you actually start, timing, you'll, have a feel for when, you need to anticipate when. The words are spoken but. Let's look at what we did okay, now we have in, the, caption editor we. Have a time, code in every, cell that, represents, the start time which is when each caption is supposed to appear and, some. Of the captions, have a time code in the end column. Which means the. Caption, will erase because no words are being spoken. So you we say that's erasing, the display. And. Then the, following, caption, has a time code indicating. When it, should appear when the when the audio when the person the narrator is speaking again okay. So. Now that we've done that let's, go back and review a little piece of this because as you, all know when captioning, it's easy to make mistakes and you should always review your work and make corrections so let's do that now. I'll. Play the video I, know that I made a couple of mistakes so, I'll stop and correct them and show you how you can correct some errors and then, we'll move on so. Here we go okay. That, first caption I think she sneezed a little bit before the caption, appeared. I'm. Kind of persnickety, about timing, as my, colleagues know so, I'm going to back. Up a little bit the, video using, the keyboard. So. I can have a nice precise, timing, point and, now. That the, woman who is sneezing is just, beginning to appear on the screen I'm going to change, the timecode by simply pressing the timing command. On. The keyboard the keyboard command, for cadet to back up a little bit at a time is ctrl G. For. Jeff. It's.
The Same the keyboard commands are the same on Mac. And Windows. So. Now let's play forward, and see what's next. That. Was a little bit late too so let's back it up just a little. Whoops. Back to time, the wrong caption so let's back her up again. Mistakes. No. Okay. No. There will be one thing here I'll show you how to change. Okay. The captions, are at the bottom of the screen and they're covering up something. Like a visual, element covering, up words so. We. Can use cadet to move the captions to the top of the screen and, the way you do that is simply, highlight, the caption, rows that you want to move. We. Have two rows and. You. Can choose a, style. Whoops. For. The top and the captions will go to, the top so. You can move them to the top and in the editor. There's. A little caret that points up next, to the row number that indicates these. Are at the top of the screen okay. Okay. So. In the interest of time I'll move on to the next thing but I just wanted to show you a couple of things that you can do to correct your work okay when, you are captioning. If. You have a five minute video you should expect to spend half, an hour on it writing. The captions time in the captions fixing, the work and then, doing something with the captions, okay now. That you've created a caption, file you've, timed it you've edited it you've checked your work everything, looks great what are you gonna do it chances. Are really high you're gonna do one of two things you're, going to send. Those captions to a video hosting, service like YouTube or Vimeo or. Maybe, you're going to embed, those captions in a video on your web page okay. Either. Way you need, to do a process which is called export, and. Exporting. Takes, the captions, that you've written and turns, them into a format, that a video player can understand, a couple. Of very common formats that some of you might know about or called webvtt. Another. One it's called SRT another, one is called TTML and there there are others too if, you use YouTube, or Vimeo or, other. Video hosting services, webvtt, tends, to be the one that they like they also like SRT. Browsers. If you're embedding. A video into a browser they they all like webvtt some, of them like TTML okay, so.
Let's. Export. This. File in one of those formats, and we'll export, it as webvtt. Okay. And. That's. Telling me I've already done it once but I'll tell it to overwrite and. Now when it exports, it gives me a message, and. Now, if. Let's. Do it this way. Okay. If. You. Have a, video that, you want to I'm, sorry I'm covering up the caption window about to uncover it, I've. Lost the caption window no. Sorry. Hang on. Is. It in the same browser oh I'm sorry okay my apologies there. We go. Come. On down here. Yes. I'm very sorry okay. Drop. This back down. Okay. For. That. Here, we go alright so here is a video. Here. Is a video embedded in a web page okay. And. These are the captions that we just wrote. I. Know. You don't want it ok so. These are the, same captions that we just wrote embedded, in a simple web page these. Would also be the captions that you would upload to YouTube Vimeo or any other service or if you create your own player that. Caption, file is what you would reference, which. Is a bigger topic than we have for tonight, a. Little. Bit of a rushed fashion that's how cadet works yes a. Good. Question yes a very good question. We. Have a rule at end cam that says just because you can do it in cadet doesn't mean that it will show up as you expect in any one of these players and that is because, different. Browsers, and different, players. Support. All. Or some of the caption, specifications. Like SRT, and webvtt. And stuff. And. So the answer with, YouTube, is no, in. The answer with Vimeo I'm pretty sure is no as well. Some, browsers will support like going to the top and going to the bottom as well one, nice thing about YouTube captions is that the user can actually drag them click and drag them wherever, they want out of the way, so. When. You use a special feature like, moving the captions, or coloring, the captions, in cadet you should always test it in the target player to make sure that that's supported, ok. So the question is when you upload the captions to youtube are they open which. Means they can't be turned off or are they closed can you turn them on or off they, are closed. And, there's if, the video has captions there's, a little a little button that surfaces. In the player and you press the button and you choose the captions, that you want to see at you. Thankfully. Yes yeah yeah. And and there is a way to disable, the automatic captions. As well which is available on the YouTube help site what you should do if you're going to be putting up real captions. In. The interest of time I'm going to turn things over to Brian now who's going to talk about, audio. Descriptions, so, let me just switch things back for him so. He can do, this. Okay. Do you me to open your project. All. Right, hi. I'm Bryan Gould I'm a colleague of Jeff and Donna's. And, I'm gonna talk about audio. Description, so audio. Description. Was. Also. Pioneered. Actually, I'm trying to put my little, pieces of paper somewhere. Where I can see them but I'm not having any luck. Was. Pioneered, also at WGBH, like captions, in. The early, 1990s. And. Audio. Description, is a similar, service except, almost the reverse of captions. In that, audio. Description, is, obviously. An audio track. That's added to the soundtrack of a TV show or a movie and, a, narrator, describes the, visual elements, of the. Theme. And. It's woven. Seamlessly. Hopefully, in. The natural pauses in the dialogue and if anyone's not familiar, with description. I will play just a little. Snippet. Of it and then I'll show you how you can use cadet to, write, description, scripts. And. This, isn't going to work because it's not my computer. Oops. But. That's okay because when I'm all done writing the script I'm, going to show you a describe, video. So. What, I have here is the. Cat the cadet. Editor and. I'm gonna move my video, to. A predetermined, point. In. A video. So. The setup is similar. To captions, although, since I've moved. Project. Type from captions, to descriptions, I should. Actually move up here I've gained, a, couple.
Of More tools. I still. Have start times and end times because you need to know when the description, needs to be spoken now. I have something a new column, called an audio cue, so, it's very important to know that with cadet, you're, not creating. An audio track, the, output. Of cadet is a script, that is intended to be either recorded. By. A human narrator, or, read out by text-to-speech. And. The way that process would work and embedding that into, a video is a presentation. For another day but, let's, put it at your. Writing a description script, that will then be recorded, in a separate, process and then added to the video, so. If you have a narrator, usually. Description, scripts are recorded, in real time you, play, the video and then and then, as a pause comes. Up the narrator would read, the, description, and the audio cue helps them know when. They should start reading, also. Narrators. Will watch, the. Time code to, know when something is coming up and also when it ends, so. That's why you have those the. Caption, column. Has turned into the description, column and of, course, it doesn't matter how much you write. You need to write as much description, as you have time for if, there's a very long pause it's. A lot you're gonna write not, very much in 3 seconds, or 5 seconds but if there's a very long cause 90 seconds, 2 minutes 5, minutes you're, gonna write a lot of description, and you, can fill, up this, entire you. Can fill up pages and pages, it's. Fine. Because. It's different from captions, captions you want to keep to a. Certain, number of words or maybe two lines so that it can be read, but. That it's a it's a different case where you're going to be hearing it for captions you, also at the top have, a really. Vital. Tool, for anybody who's writing descriptions and, that's the x window, it, gives you it, and it says, description. And pause times, and let's. Dive. Right into creating. A new description and I'll. Show you the way that this works. So. I'm gonna go ahead and hit play. Actually. I know that I'm set up for the beginning of a pause so I'm gonna go ahead and put in the in. Time for this pause and again. The process of writing descriptions, and captions is quite different for captions, you can write a transcript. And then, time it for. Descriptions you can't do that because, you, could write a description of a scene and find out there's only five seconds of silence in the entire scene so you have to kind, of map out how, much time. How much pause so. To speak there is in a scene so, that you know how you're going to approach the description, can, you give a lot of information setting. It up early or is it very dialogue. Heavy early in the scene and you need to weave in little, bits of description, as the scene goes on what. What information, are you going to be able to provide when, so as a describer, you. Need to time out maybe. A minute maybe longer, so that you have sort, of that map to know what you're going to write. When. So. I'll go ahead and play and as soon as I hear dialog starting up I'm gonna stop it rewind, it just a little bit and create, my out time. Or. My end time. Yes. Okay. That started, dialogue. I'm gonna jump back using, a keyboard command, and I'm gonna. Create. My out time so, I now, if we look up at the pause. Times. Up there I have four, point oh eight seconds. So, as an experience describer I know pretty, much what I can write, in there, I. Started. Writing descriptions, at, WGBH, in 1996. So I've been doing it for. However. I have my notes so I already know one I'm gonna write and. We've. Already set up that we're in a yurt. And. I'm, cheating because I've watched this probably 500, times and I know it's about to happen in a yurt the shaman, studies the spear and. For. The, narration session. I need to let the narrator know, when. To start speaking so the narrator may be looking at timecode but it's also helpful to have either an audio or a visual. Cue. And I. Know that, the cue here is cut, to black because. We're moving from one scene to another. Okay. So, I'll go ahead and double. Carriage return and now I'm ready to map out my next, pause. My next. Opportunity. To provide. A little description. Well. We're getting interested, here. Okay. So we'll. Go ahead and put in my in time I'm, gonna turn this up. And. Now, we'll listen for when dialogue. Starts up again. Okay. And I know I'll back up a little bit when he just about starts, talking. And. Again I have to point to eight seconds, I can't say a lot. Again. Normally, a describer, would do this process for one, or two or three minutes far into the scene I've I, know exactly what's happening and I know what, information, I need to give because we're about to hear, a sound effect of him pouring soup into a bowl and if.
You Can't see it it's very odd you, don't know what's happening what is he doing what. Is he pouring. So. He ladles. Soup. Into a, bowl. And. I've. Spelled that wrong but we have spellcheck a little. Red squiggly. In. Cadet so. I can. It's. Not magpie, its cadet. And. I. Know. I need to tell my narrator he just said innocent. Blood. Okay. So. Now. I need to show you perhaps. The best part of cadet. For writing description, which, is if we look up at the times window. We, have our paws times two point two, eight seconds. And now, the window is turned red and I have a little musical notes which means look. Up here there's a note and, yet. Actually, cadet, oops, automatically. Estimates. The reading time of a narrator and tells, me I've written 2.8 seconds, of description, okay. If. You find that your narrators speak faster, or slower that, reading, speed is adjustable, in cadet as, are. A lot of features of cadet very adjustable, but. I know that this works pretty well now I know through, experience that, that's not this. This is not a, vital. Error we're not off by two to much and. Maybe I could go back and find out squeeze, a few more. Tenths. Of a second, on one side of the description, or another but I can also just, back it up and because. The description show up on the screen just like captions, I can. Go ahead and play it and read it myself and say does this really fit or not now. If I was off by a second, or two seconds, or five seconds, I would know I'd really have to come back and edit a, lot, and it it's, very helpful to know how much time you. Have available to, you so I will back, up. And. Let's. Play this. He. Ladles hot soup into a bowl. I. Even added an adjective that was good. So. Let's. Write a couple more and. Then. I will show you something really neat. Okay. You're, lucky your Bloods still flowing that's, the beginning of what I know is going to be a pause. Oh. My. Description, is he hands. Her. The bowl. And. How did I do there oh I forgot see, I look up to my paws time to see how I did and I forgot, to put the out time so. I need to back up. Which. Is very easy to scrub. Back and forth and you can do that by very tiny increments. Sort. Of medium-sized or large increments I think I don't remember what we have it's it here maybe I a half a second a second and a second and a half just. By a different key command, also. Those are completely adjustable so, you can set. Your your, scrub, parameters, however. Whatever, works for you. So. We. Want to get out just before she says thank you that should be about right and, again I've gone a little bit over, maybe. I'm being a little sloppy with my timing again, really if you're, off by a second, or more that's when you're gonna be in trouble and if, you have 13. Seconds. 25. Seconds, 50, seconds, of pause and your writing there's no way to estimate that in your in your mind or even your reading you're gonna naturally sometimes, speak too fast so, cadet. Gives you this tool that, actually, is a check against, someone's. Natural, tendencies, to, keep, all of the beautiful words that you've written if, you need to cut it down you need to cut it down because you want that delivery, to. Be as. Consistent. And as. Flat as possible you don't want your narrator speeding, up or slowing down, you want it to be quite, quite, concise and consistent. And. Again. This tool helps, you write a script that can be recorded, there's, the, the tool, is not going to write descriptions for, you it's. Also not going to make suggestions about what's. The context, of this film my writing or this show am I writing educational. Programming, for early learners or am. I do, sort. Of an adult drama or an action, film. Where, your, your, vocabulary, your, sentence, structure your, sentence, length your. Assumptions, about what your audience has, experience, with are all going to be different so the content. Of description, again. Is. Really focus on the context. Of the. Video you're working on cadets. Not going to help you with that it's, going to help you time, things out and then. Provide, a, script, that you can. That. You can record later, but. Let's go ahead and go into review, motor I'm gonna back up actually, to. The beginning, of this. Film. And. What. We've been doing in edit mode is. The. Let. Me think about this as, you. Create you you're creating, new descriptions. And then. You're playing the, the. Video. And sort. Of the. Your. You're moving, the video to where you want to be in this case when we switch to review mode the big change is. That. When, I hit play. My. Cursor, inside. Of, the. The. Editing window is. Going to follow the. Film so, the reason for that is maybe.
25. Caps. Or 25, descriptions, down I find, an error well. I don't want to have to hunt for it that's, already gonna have you write in exactly. In the. The column and the cell that you need to be to make your edit okay. It. Also does something else we saw that it displays the descriptions, just like captions, so you can read them without having to. Look. Inside the description, field. You can read them right off the screen. There's. Also a really. Neat little feature that's so helpful for editing and I'm going to go ahead and play it right now. But. It didn't work. I. Didn't. Have the cursor, at, the beginning. If, you just start time here we go in animation, miss, hangs over snow-capped, mountains, our view weeds among the craggy Peaks titles. Appear the blender foundation presents. The durian open movie project, a blender, Institute production, this film was supported, by the Netherlands, film fund. Into. The wind watching who made the collar clothes around her neck commanding, attacks the, gold blocks history in her poem it breaks in half, so. What the heck is happening, so, cadet, this is the one feature that you need to be connected, to the internet for okay that's actually reaching out to, an open source free, TCS. Engine, and is, reading the captions out, loud so that you as the description. Editor, can, experience, what, the final product, will be like and that is, really. Really helpful because then, you don't have to be reading you can sit back and watch it as an audience member and see if your your. Sentence, structure is appropriate, if you use good vocabulary, if the. If. The descriptions, really do fit in the space you want and you can adjust and it's a it's a different experience, reading. Yourself. Or hearing. It as the final product is. Meant, to be and. I don't know any other tools. Certainly, no other free ones that that have this feature, and I've found it. Incredibly. Helpful. Let's. See anything else yes so, we've. Written all of our descriptions, we've timed them out we've. Edited. Them, and reviewed them we know that they're perfect. So. We can go ahead and export. And. We, have a description. Export. You can export, into any of these, formats. You wouldn't export to SRT, or web. VTT, but you might export, as a plain text file. But really what you want to do is, export, into Cadets description.
Format. And. This. Is why because, you get a nice HTML. Script. That. Gives all the information in. A format that's very very helpful if you're using an audio engineer or a producer and also, for the narrator you, know which. Caption. Event or description, event that you're in you, have the end time to look at you your cue right there here we have fade in I'm gonna scroll down just a little bit. Once. We have some dialogue. You. Can see your audio cues, right here the. Description. That's going to be read is in very large bold. Font and then the, narrator may want to look. At the same time at the timecode, and know when to stop. To when they're gonna need to stop talking and that. Can be either handed. To someone on a laptop or on a tablet, or print. It out in. This way and this is. Really. Simple but very clean and useful. Script. Format, I'm. Going to click back into Cadets. And that, was sort of really, quick but, I, think, I'm, ready to answer any questions if you have them, about. Writing description, with, cadet yeah. I'll. Repeat I think. So. The question is does. Cadet, for descriptions, and captions, support. Multiple languages, and the answer is yes and. How. Many, or. They are there any that we know it doesn't. You. Can write, captions. You, write captions in cadet in any any. Encoded. Language, that you can type into your computer let's put it that way you. Can do the same for descriptions, and you, can certainly, generate, a script like what Brian showed you and print, it out what. The text-to-speech engine, does. With that that's, a good question we've never played with that my my assumption. Is that it's probably going to mangle it but. I don't know I don't know but, the real answer to question is yes you can write just about anything you want into the editor. Any. Other questions. Yes. Right here. Right, so the question is are you exporting. And description only the script or also. That TTS, voiced along with it and the answer is you're, not. We. Haven't moved. Forward to try to. Do. That, the, text-to-speech, engine that's being used is great, in the editing, process I. Don't. Know how great it would be to. Listen. To frankly. It does make mistakes it, spells some things out when you wouldn't expect it to you would have to do some some. Fudging, with it. Yeah. Also technically, there are some challenges. But. You could if you wanted to. Export. Say, just a raw, text file and then. Feed that through, another. Text-to-speech, engine like text aloud or something else that. Maybe. It is more sophisticated and, you can create an audio track that way with. Perhaps nicer, voices and then you could edit that into your video. Yeah um. Well. Yeah why don't you talk about what happens with the screen sure, the script then needs to be. Recorded. Tip most typically the, way it works is that a, human, narrator, reads the script and that's, recorded, and then, there's a post-production, process, where, that is integrated. Into. The original soundtrack, unfortunately. With most video. Platforms, Vimeo, and YouTube, and. Others there's, no way to have. Like, captions, a toggle on and off so, there's no description on and off so you will have to offer either an open describe video or, two versions, of the video one that is. Described. And one that's not that's not a that's. Not. The fault of cadet obviously that's the fault, of html5, not, allowing you to. Do that or really technology. Yes.
Mostly Correct yes. There. Isn't any, any. Formalized. Format. For. Say. Exporting. The. Description, script that Brian wrote into, an, XML, format that all Texas, speech engines will understand. Unlike, captions, where you've got a number of standardized, caption, formats. Yeah. Sure, yes. Yeah. There there. Yes we've participated in a number of working groups around various. Kinds of markup languages. There. There used to be a. Style. Language, called audio style sheets which I don't even know if that's been. Used, in decades but, the, idea behind audio, style sheets is that you would use, styles. Like. CSS. For text, you would use styles, for audio, and, as far as I know audio style sheets went nowhere. So. Am i right yeah somebody's giggling in the background. So, there. Has long been, a need, for, something, like what you're talking about but there really has been no standardized, approach which is why one. Of the suggestions that we make is you. Use just a raw text file and feed that into a text-to-speech engine. That's. That's one approach but right now browsers. And audio and video players can't. Do that text-to-speech, for you as far as I know there. Are there aren't that custom, yes I should yes thank you yeah there are custom players that do do that, and. There are other approaches, where you can actually feed, invisible. Descriptions, to. A region. That a, screen, reader can read aloud on-the-fly that's another approach that's another presentation, for another night. That. Are fed and that a screen reader would read your screen we read, while, the video is playing but, that's about it. Is, but it's, a custom solution, that's. Not, widely. Available we have another question. Do. You have to see the description you have to see the description text or can, it be hidden but, can it still be read aloud. Yes. The. Question is yes can can you turn the descriptions, off in, the caption, editor.
Like. That yes so, yes. So the audio would still play so if the captions, in the editor are distracting. You. Can. Yes. Yes. You. Would never have both ups and the reason you would never have both captions, and descriptions playing. In the editor, because. This. Is an editor and not a player, right. So. You're. Either editing, captions or, you're editing and, creating. Descriptions. There's. Probably. Times. As a player, you would want you you would want to have the option of either descriptions, or captions, or both or none but. In the editor, we're limited to only having, one or, the other and the, technical, reason for that is because. Captions. And descriptions are, just time text, filed. As we've being created, and displayed on the fly as they're being created so that. Doesn't know the difference it, it's just displaying the time text that you're creating, it's. The. Mode whether you're in description, or or. Captions, the, way it displays or whether it reads it out loud. So. You would have you would have to create the sound so. The. Issue is that there's not yet, a seamless. Elegant, way to write, a description script. And then. Have it describe to video. Nobody. Does this, cadet. Enables. You to. Have. A script that's timed, and that, you can record, a. Narrator. Reading it and then you have to marry that description. Track. To. The video then. That would be uploaded, to YouTube, or Vimeo or, whatever your, video. Platform is. So. That's a that's a great question, so the, question is because, people listen to screen readers so much faster than natural human speech. You. Could write a lot more description, so we have done some research and, testing, with this mostly. At the use of. Texas. Speech as the, description, voice. And. What, we found as a, result of that testing, was that, for, shorter. Sort, of how-to and, or, academic, videos, the. Text-to-speech voice was. Fine and the better this. We did this mmm. Seven. Years ago and. Text-to-speech. Voices we're just getting really pretty, good now they're they're quite excellent. But. When you are watching a film or, or. Any, video for entertainment. The overwhelming. Consensus, was that text-to-speech, didn't, cut it, human, narrator, was. Much more pleasurable it, didn't make mistakes. It, didn't stumble over weird words and those, are all of the you know those are some of the issues you have with text-to-speech. But. It's. Also not been. Done. In any White's right away so, once, it is probably. People would be able to improve it. Basically. This space we have really, hard cutoff, so we appreciate, everyone, you. Know coming out today we can continue, the conversations. And discussions kind. Of outside. But the, library has a a hard, stop so we appreciate its, always everyone coming it's a great top, tonight definitely. Going to be using today myself. On the project, coming up so thank you guys and we, will have our next Meetup on March 6, so we're always the first Tuesday of the, month stay. Tuned to the. Twitter and the meetup page we'll be announcing that very shortly thanks.
2018-02-09 18:25
