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JHB's avatar
JHB
Frequent Contributor
5 years ago

GoToWebinar Transcriptions / Subtitles

I used the auto-transcription feature to create a text version of the webinar audio.  We need to share the webinar recording via our YouTube page. I'm not clear how to USE the G2W transcription. I se...
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  • Chris Droessler's avatar
    Chris Droessler
    5 years ago

    The text you provided is a .vtt file, not a .srt file.  The subtle difference is a comma vs a period. 

     

    The VTT file looks like this

    00:00:00.030 --> 00:00:05.279

     

    The SRT file looks like this

    00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:05,279

     

    Make sure the last part is three digits, not two.  Several of yours have two digits, which might cause malfunctions.

JHB's avatar
JHB
Frequent Contributor

6/24 update - be sure to read the correction posted by Chris Droessler two messages down.

For those who may be interested, here is what the G2W transcript file looks like. It's a simple text file that can opened with Notepad or any other document reader.

(I'll edit some text just to leave enough you can see the format. Any ... or XXX are edits to simplify.)

0:05
Good afternoon, everybody. We are glad to have you joining us.
0:11
In this webinar, we will be covering....
0:20
XXX was going to be our presenter that she had a family emergency. And so YYY  has graciously stepped in. 
0:50
If you want to learn more about these other events we host, you can .....

 

An SRT file (SubRip Subtitle file) has special coding that synchronizes it to the video. You can still edit in Notepad. It looks more like this: (Looks like this is a VTT file, not SRT, although format is similar.)

1
00:00:00.03 --> 00:00:05.279
Good morning! Welcome, everybody, We are excited to be hosting this topic.

2
00:00:05.279 --> 00:00:10.230
I have been really looking forward to it myself and I hope you have as well. 

3
00:00:10.23 --> 00:00:16.049
My name is XXX. Among other things I host this series...

4
00:00:16.049 --> 00:00:20.760
Today's topic is...

 

Chris Droessler's avatar
Chris Droessler
Respected Contributor
5 years ago

The text you provided is a .vtt file, not a .srt file.  The subtle difference is a comma vs a period. 

 

The VTT file looks like this

00:00:00.030 --> 00:00:05.279

 

The SRT file looks like this

00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:05,279

 

Make sure the last part is three digits, not two.  Several of yours have two digits, which might cause malfunctions.

  • JHB's avatar
    JHB
    Frequent Contributor
    5 years ago

    Interesting. The file had .SRT as its filetype in filename. I'm pretty sure that excerpt was the download of automated captions from last one we posted to YouTube.  Lots to know.

     

    I think I'll mostly be working with raw transcript at first, straight from G2W. And that's purely a TXT file. Thanks for adding to the discussion.

     

    Does anyone know if the G2W format has a NAME for its type? If yes, there's likely a converter that could be used to adapt the existing time notations into a format YouTube can read.

    • Chris Droessler's avatar
      Chris Droessler
      Respected Contributor
      5 years ago

      I have GoTo create a transcript and copy it to a Word document.

      I edit that Word doc and create natural line breaks for the length of each caption. I try to keep the length of my captions to three lines of text or less, which is about one line of text in a Word doc.

       

      Then I go into Final Cut Pro where I insert the captions and adjust the length of time each appears on screen.  I tweak the text and fix the proper nouns, etc.

      When I have all the captions correct, I export the captions using X-Title Mojave, which is a third-party tool to export the captions from Final Cut Pro.  This creates a .vtt file with my captions.  The regular caption export in Final Cut Pro does not work well for me.

       

      I then do a final edit on the .vtt file to set the horizontal and vertical placement of the captions.

      I upload the video and the .vtt file to my website and then check for errors.

       

      A typical line in my .vtt file will look like this:

      00:00:17.633 --> 00:00:21.300 align:left position:5% line:-3

       

      That is good for any caption that is one or two lines of text.  I change the "3" at the end of the line to a "4" if the caption is 3 lines of text.