Tong Family

Well, they finally added automatic caption creation, but of course they are biased towards the apple itt format so nothing much happens. So here is a guide to making captions work:

1. Create your movie as usual
2. When you are done, look for the magic wand that is in the middle of the screen and choose Transcribe to Captions
3. This will fire up an AI model and you will see a new section of the screen which is in purple above your movie that has the captions. These are in ITT format (iTunes Text format) which is useless. So right click on any of the text and choose Duplicate to New Format and choose SRT.
4. Now you need to look at the timeline for any text boxes which are red, this indicates that caption has an error. I found that if you convert it to CEA-608 which does allow burned in captions, you get lots of errors because it is a limited format. And you have to manually go through each to figure out what it is.
5. Typically it is because the text width is more than 32 characters or the interval is too short. This is a huge pain to edit as on an hour show I had 40 or so of these. But if you select a caption then in the Windows inspector, you can see the error. The big thing that I found is that it will say “The caption occurs too close to the previous caption move the caption 21 frames to the right” so you have to just slide it over a bit and when it is correct, the red will become a dark icon. The click behavior is a little strange, when you drag the box to the right, you must release the mouse to see if you are still in an error condition.
6. Selection is also a little strange, you should first find the “red” box and click on the space below so the head moves to that location, then you can click on the box itself to see the error. If you don’t do this then zoom in and zoom out don’t work properly as they work around the track head and not what is selected.
7. Even if you do this, though you can miss some because, the little red boxes are so small. So send it to the Compressor. If there is an error iIt says Timing Error: Captions Exceed Data Limit. You need to click on the CEA-608 Captions section and the property pane on the right shows the entire list, then you click on the Alert icon at the bottom and it will show you the offending lines. So you to go back to Final Cut Pro and find the offending caption that you missed and trim them
8. If you do go ahead and make these corrections, then you need to choose the CEA-608 files when you Export to the Compressor and it will burn them in. Note that by default if you do not do this, you will get ITT files and then the Compressor just throws them away, so make sure the CEA-608s are selected when you send to Compressor
9. If instead just use STT and then you can’t burn them into your video and have to have them as sidecar files for YouTube. Then you have to select the project and choose File > Export Captions and make sure to select STT without formatting.
10. Finally, when you upload to YouTube, you can add the STT and you will get your own generated captions, although YouTube will do this itself.
11. The last aside if that you can generate multiple captions with a right click on the caption area and then choosing Duplicate to New Format in the Wizard icon, but I haven’t figured out how to change the default format. You can have ITT, SRT and CEA-608 all in the same Project.
12. You can also get rid of overlaps (which should not exist with automatic captioning) by right clicking on the caption and choosing Resolve Overlaps