GoToWebinar Transcriptions / Subtitles

[JHB]

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 see that I can copy/paste, which results in a transcript with a time code followed by text on the next line.  But that doesn't seem to be the SRT type file YouTube wants.  Is there a way to use this file directly (with YouTube)? A converter?

[Chris Droessler]

You Tube will generate the closed captioning for you.  You can then go in and edit that translation to fix words that are unique to your webinar.  You probably do not have to use the GoTo translation service.

I post my videos to our own web site and create a .vtt file (similar to .srt) with the closed captions that plays along with the video.

[JHB]

Thanks, I'm familiar with YouTube autogenerating, but I'd like to see how we can use the G2W file.  We have 10 webinar hosts and only one person who loads the YouTube account. (And that's just an extra task. It's not his major job.)

So if we know the individual hosts can do most of the work and turn over a file to be imported, that would be best.  Doesn't seem to be an option to export as a SRT file, which would be ideal.  Today, I exported the transcript and took into Word to edit, which was quicker than line by line and allowed for spell check and search/replace. Then saved as TXT file in Notepad. 

Supposedly you can upload an untimed transcript into YouTube and it will synchronize.  One set of "how to" instructions said this only takes 5 minutes.  The onscreen message in the YouTube configuration box says this may take "several hours".  So I'm playing around. I got an error the first time, so then stripped off G2W's timestamps.

[JHB]

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...

[JHB]

It did work - finally. Not sure how long it actually took to synchronize the transcript in YouTube. One place said 5 minutes; Youtube screen said it might take several hours. I know it wasn't ready in 30 minutes.  I checked back in a couple of hours and screen said "processing" BUT when I refreshed the screen, it was done.  So less than 2 hours.

Recap: we want to use the transcripts from G2W so that each host/presenter can do as much of the cleanup, editing as possible for captions before turning over to the one person who can load to YouTube. We've been experimenting with the option where you load a transcript without timings into YouTube and its autosync feature matches the text with the recording to create the timings.

I don't know that this is the most efficient way but here's what I did. Feel free to add on if you have other experiences. This sounds like a lot of steps, but it really didn't take long.

GENERATE/DOWNLOAD THE TRANSCRIPT

From Video Library link in G2W, chose the 3 dots on my session that show more options.

• Edit Transcript
• Generate Transcript (It takes a while.)
• Once available, COPY (no export option)

CLEAN UP THE TRANSCRIPT

Because I tried earlier and YouTube would not accept the file with timings, I then needed to remove those. 

(I suggest you try it yourself. If you don't have to delete timings, one less step.)

Delete Timings

• PASTE Transcript into Excel.  
• Insert Column to left so I have A to work with as blank column
• Use Column A as a "Sequence #" to document the row order. Autofill starting with 1 and dragging all the way down. (For me, 977 rows).
• Sort by Column B (Transcript Text). That groups all the numbers (timings) together
• Delete the block of rows with timings
• Re-sort the by Column A (Sequence #) to put the rows back in the original order.
• Delete Column A (Sequence)

So now you have all the transcript lines, in correct order with timing numbers removed.

• Copy text

Edit transcript text

I wanted to be able to search/replace and spell check, so chose to work in Word.

• Paste as unformatted text into Word.
• Edit/Correct text errors to the degree you want.

We don't try to edit EVERYTHING but there are some common mistakes like acronym use that almost always get wrong. Could have a presenter skim for anything glaring.  For this one, we had very few transitions on speakers, so I added the speaker name each time voice changed.

(If you don't plan to edit much, could have kept working in Excel.)

I thought I read (could be wrong) that I needed a blank line break between each line of text. So I used Find/Replace to locate each paragraph marker and replace with TWO paragraph markers. (Under "Special" in the Replace box.)

• Save as a TXT file. (No formatting at all.)

LOAD FILE INTO YOUTUBE (focusing on transcript, not the entire process)

Configure the entry in YouTube. Follow directions to Add Video/Create.

Upload the recording file and fill out the various fields.

Choose MORE OPTIONS

Look for Language, Subtitles, and Closed Caption (CC) section

click Upload subtitles

• You have a choice of with timing or without timing. Choose WITHOUT.

Load your file. Finish any other parts of the configuration.

As I mentioned above, the screen kept saying YouTube was processing the autosync, but at some point it was complete and screen message wrong. When I refreshed the screen I was it was done. Ours took somewhere between 20 minutes and 2 hours. Note sure as I left it to work on other projects.

[Chris Droessler · Accepted solution]

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]

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]

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.