All posts by James Moore

Captioning (Subtitles) and Transcription On The Cheap

Gadgets, Online Learning, , , , , , , , , , ,

Dictate

One idea that has been bouncing about my head, but I have yet to fully investigate, is creating captions/subtitles on the cheap. Paying a third party to provide this  transcription service can get expensive – you can expect to pay $1 a minute, although there are places where you can go for a cheaper  deal.

However, there are automated services like Siri, OS X Dictation, or Dragon Dictate. YouTube will automatically create a transcript when you upload a video (although the accuracy might not be there), and this text file can be downloaded and edited.

My thoughts are to take a regular video recording, and then parse it into one of these services. I just have not got round to this yet, but may give it a go soon.

Dragon Dictate looks like it has part of this capability, but costs about $200 and works with one voice only (no good for interviews).

The two approaches that look like they will work best for me (for free) are:

  1. Uploading an audio or video file to YouTube, and then editing the transcribed text file.
  2. Using Soundflower to send an audio file into the OS X Dictation service. This post from Level Up Lunch describes the process.

Option 1 is the way to go with video. The process here is going to synch the transcription with the video. Option 2 will be realtime, but could be useful for situations where I do not have Internet connectivity, or just want a text file.

Greenscreen / Chromakey On The Mac

Misc, , , , ,
Before and After

Before and After

A work colleague asked about creating chromakey / green screen images the other day. The wanted to use their Mac computer to superimpose pictures of students on notable Chicago locations.

My quick-and-dirty suggestions were:

  • Photo Booth (the easiest, most appropriate solution from my perspective)
    • The downside to using Photo Booth is that it crashes on my laptop due to my installation of a Bluetooth webcam.
  • iMovie (a bit of a hack, but the process within iMovie is extremely easy)

Another colleague suggested using Photoshop. This tutorial clearly outlines the process. The above example only took a few minutes to create – I did not follow the tutorial fully to the end (hue saturation) which would have removed the green fringing.

Another option would be to use Veescope on iPad.