Speaker 1: This is a long-form video designed to help you add subtitles to your project, with an eye toward making your work eligible for the new Amazon Video Direct platform that requires subtitles. I'll show you how to get an automatic head start using free tools like YouTube voice recognition and an application called Subtitle Edit. It's all something that used to cost a lot of time and money, but I think I found an easy way for you to do it yourself. So let's say you've just finished a project. One of your biggest goals is going to be to get your stuff to show up at places where people search for things to watch. Getting yourself onto this page, or anywhere on Amazon, usually involves already having been a successful film, or some sort of blue-chip negotiation because you're already affiliated with a studio, or you might pay a lot of money to an aggregator who submits your content, but that comes at a big risk. There's always been another way in, and just to use a case study, this is an old film of mine, and the way I got it onto Amazon was through a service called CreateSpace. Acquired by Amazon a long time ago, CreateSpace has always been primarily designed for selling DVDs on demand, and that meant that instead of having to buy in bulk a big box of your content in DVD format, and sending it into Amazon, and then having Amazon be the provider that would pack and ship the products, and deal with all the customer service issues, people could just order these things on demand, and as the orders came in, Amazon would print the DVDs in nice packaging with all the liner artwork that you upload. But at the same time, there was always this option too that you see, Amazon Instant Video. So what happened until this past week was that CreateSpace was giving you the option to actually have them rip the standard definition 480p content off of your DVD, and then submit it to Amazon Instant Video, and there was a delay, and finally it would show up in the search results. The nice thing about that was that on one listing page, you can have all of the retail history, the product reviews, and the purchase of the DVD, but also you could flip over to Amazon Video, and either rent the movie, or buy the movie, but it was always in SD. On top of that, there were ways for your content to go straight to a variety of compatible devices, and that would include all of the usual suspects, but also smart TVs that had the Amazon Video app, and other connected devices like PlayStations, and so on. So recently, Amazon introduced something called Amazon Video Direct, and Amazon Video Direct particularly addresses that limitation of uploading of content that used to only be possible at the independent level in SD resolution. I wrote about it, and one thing that I noticed that didn't seem reported on a lot at the launch of Amazon Video Direct was this fine print about how all the uploads to be authenticated and authorized for showing up on the Amazon Video platform had to have captions. Amazon explained this in their support section, and when you go to technical specifications, captioned information, they explain here that basically, in order to maintain the integrity of the platform, and also for the good reason of being able to access people who would be able to make use of closed captions, such as the hearing impaired community, it's just simply a mandatory requirement. And so the question is, how to take advantage of this great opportunity for uploading your content onto Amazon when you don't have any captions yet? The way that the Amazon Video Direct interface works is fairly simple. When you are uploading your video assets, it gives you the spot for uploading the actual H.264 HD file, the captions file that's usually in .srt format, and an optional trailer. For me, Amazon Video Direct seemed like an opportunity to take some of my recent work that seemed to have already lived out its life and try it out in a new context. In this case, it was designed to stream at this microsite, and it wasn't designed to be printed onto DVDs as just a 30-minute documentary on a niche subject. But I figure on Amazon, it might have a chance of reaching a new audience for people searching for things like the subject of this film, Steinway Piano Restoration. So if Amazon Video Direct requires subtitles, then making them is going to be the first challenge. And the problem is, is that subtitle editing programs have always been, to put it lightly, a pain in the ass. And you'll notice just by glancing at this, albeit incomplete, page that basically the selection is pretty poor, and also they're not big companies like Adobe making them. Premiere has captioning built in, but it's really primitive and still in development, and designed more for the hearing-impaired. Among the entries on this list, one of the more popular ones in the past has been Easy Titles. It has a Premiere plug-in, and it's used by more content creators than any other option. But the price is 1,620 euros, and it just feels like a big ripoff. Fortunately, there is one option that I would personally recommend, and it happens to be free. And this option, called Subtitle Edit, unfortunately only works on Windows systems, unless you compile it for other operating systems. So I'm going to proceed, with apologies to Mac users, to show you how to use Subtitle Edit to create subtitles on a Windows platform. When you go to this site, there's a download link that you'll find on the left side of the screen. And the download that you want to use is this one. It's a setup installation file that you unzip to install it locally on your Windows PC. But it's not like this program, just because it's free, or any other, even that costs money, makes the process of creating subtitles any easier. You still have to manually type out all of the subtitles, one by one, and you start with a blank page. But there is a way to cheat, and that's basically why I created this video. Even though our final destination is Amazon Video Direct for this exercise, subtitles can be used on a variety of different platforms, and one of them is YouTube. So for the same film that I uploaded to YouTube, YouTube these days automatically generates subtitles. And you can see when I clicked on the CC that's available at the bottom right of the frame, it flashed, and I'll do it one more time, something that said English auto-generated. It does this if it can actually hear, legibly, what's said in the film. There might be some cases where it refuses to transcribe subtitles, but in most cases, as long as your dialogue is not heavily interrupted by music or other sound effects, it automatically does this auto transcription as a default behavior when you upload films to YouTube. So that's indeed what happened in this case. There are situations where the dialogue track is competing with other assets to such an extent that the automatic transcription doesn't pick up on audio. So the safest thing to do in that sort of situation, for example here, I have a lot of dialogue spoken that is competing with this piano track that's blue, and also there's some ambient noise down here. And so if that's true, the kind of simple solution also is to simply mute those tracks, as long as you know over the course of your entire project that an entire track is non-diegetic, doesn't have the dialogue. And so you might need to do some reorganization of tracks, or just do a enable by enable basis in terms of turning off certain assets. But your goal would be for another version of this sequence, so you'd want to copy your sequence, in this case in Premiere, make a new one that's called sort of audio for captioning. And for that version you'd want to have only the diegetic things, the spoken things, be heard, and the other things either muted out on the track level, or if you can't do that on the individual level when you enable or disable certain audio assets. So when you export that, you export to a minimal version of the film. You can even turn off the video so that it renders faster, but still keeps it legal for upload to YouTube. And when you do that, you are kind of creating a proxy up on YouTube, so that when you upload to YouTube, it will do the auto transcription without any of the music or sound effects baked in, and you have the clearest shot at the automatic transcription working. So after you upload your film, you give it some time to render out or to interpret the closed captioning, and you get this icon. There's the next step to take, which is to click, if you are logged into your own account that you uploaded it to, the CC icon underneath the frame. When we arrive at this tab for subtitles and closed captions, it's in the same interface where other tabs exist that we've used in the past at YouTube to edit the description and do other enhancements. Under the Subtitles tab, rather than clicking this button to add new subtitles or closed captions, we do see from before that the published captions are the ones that were automatic using voice recognition. So clicking into that, we can see the fairly poor quality that automatic transcription does, but since it's about 50 or even 75% of where you need to be, in terms of not only giving you a start, but also lining them up with the specific moments that the words are spoken, which is actually the most difficult part of adding subtitles, it's really a good place to start. And then indeed, you could click this blue Edit button and go in and use this cloud-based web interface to simply edit the titles into the format that you want. But it's still a more primitive way to do things, and a little riskier given that it is in the cloud rather than locally stored, to go through and make these edits. And that will bring us back to the subtitle edit program that we downloaded earlier. But before we get there, we need to be able to get a file of this, and so this is where the big surprise comes in, or at least the big treat that YouTube gave us. I'm gonna leave from here, and I'm gonna discard these edits that I didn't even make, and go back to this place where it has the automatic captions. What's great is, when I click once on it, rather than clicking Edit, I can go to the Actions drop-down menu, and it gives me a choice of three different file formats for downloading this, all of this useful information, this start, if you will, for making subtitles into these three files. And the most popular, and if you will, most compatible kind is .srt. They're commonly used in all kinds of contexts, particularly DVD authoring. So I'm gonna go ahead and choose that, and when I click it, it gives me the dialog box, and I can save it to a file. You can see that I already have, but I'll do it again. So I'm saying Sitka Captions. So now that I've saved the .srt file, I can go back to Subtitle Edit, and Subtitle Edit understands .srt as a standard file format. So when I click Open, and I navigate to that file, it opens up in this more professional interface. What's more, the way Subtitle Edit works, of course there's lots of complicated functions, and we're not going to go through all of them, but to keep it the simplest, you can navigate to the corresponding video file, because all we've done so far is we've just uploaded the .srt file. So now that we've associated the source video file, the same one we uploaded to YouTube, to which all these draft, auto-recognized subtitles got their timings corresponded to, it really is going to be a subtitle-by-subtitle refinement, in which case there's going to be cases of capitalization, punctuation, and just some words that got wrong. To give a terrible, almost R-rated example of how this can go terribly wrong, this is a subtitle that transcribed the word pianist into something else. So to give an example here of changing to something that works, there we go. Okay, pianist. So there are a couple of interface things I want to point out, even though you'll want to learn Subtitle Edit in more detail by using the help files that come with the program. But when it comes to what's standard and what's kind of legal, in terms of the width of the lines of text, there is this auto-break function that, with one click, you can put this...it looks almost like HTML line breaks...at a kind of automatically placed spot so that it stays legal inside the normal limits of captions. But the other thing I want to make sure to mention is that actually these are the most conservative guidelines, and it turns out that Amazon Video Direct, YouTube, Vimeo, and many of the other platforms that playback captions, have a lot more latitude where you can go quite a bit farther out. So it's really not something to stress too much about, especially if you are adding more than what the auto-generated caption lengths are. So with this having been done on a line-by-line basis, which I haven't done yet here, if you do feel as though you've got lock picture on all of the captions that you've created, that you've refined, that you might have even had to add because the auto-recognition didn't pick up on it, you can save to the same file, and that .srt file can be re-uploaded back, first of all, to YouTube where the original captions are replaced with the better ones. So here we are back at the place we left, and we just simply go to the tab once again, and we have the automatic ones still here, but we would then add new subtitles, and we're choosing the English language, and we select the function to upload a file, and instead of transcript, we're choosing subtitles file. We choose the file we just created, click open, and then click upload. So let's say we publish what we perfected inside the subtitle edit application. We can certainly get rid of the English automatic version, but also this is where it gets kind of exciting, and yet at the same time it's not the perfect solution. If you want to add other languages, you can drop this down and choose another language. So let's say in this case that we want to add French. We can do that, and then upload a new file using the same interface as before, but we haven't created it yet. The good news is subtitle edit has a function built into it called auto translate, and auto translate is literally using Google Translate and kind of integrating it into the program's architecture. So here when you click auto translate, you choose what language you used originally, which in this case was English, and you can choose the destination language. What subtitle edit is doing is it's simply doing what you would have to do if you went to translate.google.com and tediously put each field into each of the translation columns. In this case, it's a one-click function where I click translate, and it goes through line by line, caption by caption, and simply does its best shot at transcribing your English titles into French. So if I click OK to accept this, then you can see that there's this new interface where I have the base text of this currently loaded file. Always a good idea to save as right away so that you make sure that you don't overwrite the English titles. So I'm saying French captions, or I could say French subtitles.srt, and click OK or save. So now back at YouTube, I can go ahead and choose that file that I created, French subtitles, and upload it. Now there's no guarantee that those will be decent or good translations, but it'll certainly be much better than the voice recognition that YouTube did. One last thing I like to mention is another sort of guerrilla trick used to create subtitles faster, cheaper, easier than the traditional approach of loading up subtitle edit and typing them from scratch. And that's using a program that uses, that provides voice recognition, and the most popular by far, and maybe arguably the best one available at the consumer level, is this program called Dragon Naturally Speaking, or it has been called that in the past. It's by this company called Nuance. And there are different tiers of the software, but if you get the simplest kind, your goal is basically to watch the film while wearing headphones, and then hearing what you hear through the headphones, and talking into a microphone that's connected to this Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition program. So I don't know if this is making sense, but if you kind of think about it offline, this is an easy way to be able to get a head start, and you'll still have to go into subtitle edit and refine things. But you are watching the film, and you're translating on the spot by just simply repeating what you hear through your headphones, and the microphone is taking in your dialogue, what you say that you're hearing, and then turning it into text that you can in turn upload to YouTube. In this interface for subtitles and closed captions, there was an option to create using transcribe and auto-sync. So when you take this approach, let's say that this is actually the entire transcript of the film, all YouTube then has to do is just use its voice recognition to rely on your translation or your transcription of what was said, and then just simply set the timings to match the words with the times that they appear. And especially if they're in order, it really can't go too wrong. Its accuracy rate is extremely high, and so it sets the timings, and after some delay it lines up your perfected transcript with all of the timings that it hears based on an analysis of your audio track. Wrapping up with one last point, even though we were inspired to create the subtitles to make our upload compliant with Amazon Video Direct, other services like Vimeo also play subtitles natively, and now that we've created a perfected subtitles file, we can also go to any such corresponding upload to Vimeo, go to Settings, and under the Advanced tab, there's an Add Captions and Subtitles header. You can choose the file, select the English captions in this case, you activate Status to On, you drop down to pick the specific language that you know the subtitles to be in, you choose the type of display format, which in this case is the more attractive subtitles for general audiences, and when you click Save and go back to the video, now we're seeing a CC icon, and when we click on it, we can turn off or activate English titles. So I hope this was helpful. I encourage you to go back to the Focus Pulling article to read more about the nuances of the settings that you can have and the different monetization options that you have once your video goes live on Amazon Video Direct. At least now we have captions that make them valid for streaming on Amazon Video Direct, but in the comments, I'd love to hear about the successes that you might have and the challenges you might have as Amazon launches this new service. Thank you.