Moved my triptych of nature poems, Tangled Garden, forward by 2 seconds and had to manually adjust 282 subtitles! Sigh - all in the name of art. (And even then, am finding a few small errors in the timing of the subtitles as I go through the track.)

The pic is from a low resolution .m4v (iPhone quality) that I am using to check the subtitles.

direct link: Painting of Vision Trees

This is the video I subtitled. Press Play, and then click on CC that appears below the video until it goes red. Let the mouse hover over the CC and a menu will appear that gives you access to "Translate Captions." Click on the first one, Africaans, and a drop-down menu will open and you can scroll down to choose another language. Google Translate automatically translates the captions into the language you chose, albiet mechanically, and not always accurately, but for someone who doesn't speak English but would like to know what is being generally said, what a wonderful option to offer. I am totally chuffed. Way to go, Google!

How did I subtitle it? Read on!

It required hours searching via Google, reading instructions and watching a few tutorials on subtitling. This article was most helpful: Adding and Editing captions / subtitles at Google Help Center. My blog post explains, as best I can, what I did, and I am writing it so that if you wish to subtitle your videos, you will have a better idea of how than I did.

My video is 8 minutes long. And, man, did I talk fast -meaning cram a lot in. Last night I subtitled about a minute and a half using a text editor while watching the video on my desktop but wasn't able to copy the time codes directly and found entering each one manually not just onerous but I made too many mistakes. It also took hours. I had to find an easier way.

This video by rewboss was helpful. I used the Third Party APP, CaptionTube, recommended in this instructional video on creating captions.



YouTube offers translation of captions/subtitles, albiet mechanically, in 25 languages, Hindi among them. It is definitely worthwhile to spend some time subtitling your video so that it's more accessible for people around the world. Google is making the world smaller by enabling us to communicate globally. I ♡Google.

Once you have given CaptionTube permission to access your YouTube videos, you can open your video in CaptionTube. Below is a screenshot of what the CaptionTube interface looks like. You play your video, listen, start a Caption at the beginning of each phrase or sentence, type it in, decide how much time it takes, and save the Caption. Then you play it again to make sure it more-or-less fits where the words are, and how long they take to be spoken. It takes some time at first, but you get better at figuring out how much time to give for phrases, clauses or sentences. Too many words fills up the screen and makes it 'too busy.' You want to achieve the best balance you can.

My video was a challenge because I spoke so fast and said so much. Most videos won't be as full of speaking as my painting of my vision trees was. I had a story to tell, and at 8 minutes, it was a bit long. Because I rushed through much of what I had to say, for a 'non-English speaking' viewer, understanding it proved challenging. I was asked a few times in different postings of it if I could offer the text by people whose native language was Urdu, or Punjabi, or Hindi, or French, or Spanish. Some of what I related had been posted in my blog and then included in an unfinished manuscript some years ago, so that was easy to post in the comments at Facebook or other sites on request, but in at least half of Vision Trees I was speaking off the cuff. I had no text. Last night and this morning I generated text from the verbal track by creating subtitles, which make me, honestly, very happy.

I bookmarked the CaptionTube subtitle file I was working on for my Vision Trees video and was able to re-enter the track where I left off. This helped since making subtitles out of densely crammed spoken text requires breaks now and then. Oh, and I needed to sleep for a night, too.


(click on images for larger size)

After you finish subtitling your video with CaptionTube, and you click on Publish, you are offered a few options. I chose to download the file as a subtitle file, an .srt file.


On my desktop, I opened the .srt file in a text editor and saw what you see in the screen capture above. I opened the video in VLC, but you could use any video player, and loaded the subtitle file, and watched the video with the subtitles I had made, making corrections to the subtitle file in the text editor. Sometimes subtitles overlapped because I hadn't given enough time between them, and there were some repetitions, so I corrected that in the text editor. Then I re-saved the file as an .srt file and uploaded that to my video at YouTube.

To add a subtitle file, open your "Videos" in the drop-down menu under your account name. Beside each video you will see a downward arrow; click on that, and a menu opens, and you see 'Captions and Subtitles,' open it, and you are given the option to upload a subtitle file. You can upload more than one subtitle file, if you have different languages. Google will offer these files to viewers of your video. So, for instance, you can upload a subtitle track in English, and one, if you are bilingual or a polyglot, in Spanish, or French, or Urdu, or whatever languages you like. The subtitle/captions option is fantastic, and Google can also offer mechanical translations in 25 languages. How cool is that?

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The music in Painting of Vision Trees is by Pierre-Marie Coedes, 'City night hubbub (instrumental)' from his album, "Lapses of Time." Pierre-Marie's music is a complex, sensitive interweaving of instruments and rhythms, and while eminently listenable, reveals riches on closer listening. Do check out his oeuvre at Jamendo.

If you're interested in the process of the painting, including a little photo of my set-up videoing it, I talk about it here: http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2011/06/vision-trees.html.