Manage resources with Kaltura MediaSpace guide

Captions should translate the soundtrack of a video into text. The caption file should be faithful to the soundtrack but doesn't have to be 100% verbatim. The main objective in editing captions is to remove any errors in the automatically generated file.

If you have any additional time, the following guidance provides tips for improving your caption files.

Do you need to identify who is speaking on a video?

• If you are the only speaker on your recording, and your students know you are the presenter, you don't need to identify yourself in the captions.
• If there is only one speaker on the whole clip, you may choose to identify the speaker in the first caption.
  • There's no need to identify the speaker again later in the clip.
• If there is more than one speaker and it is not clear from the visuals who is speaking, consider identifying speakers in your captions when a new speaker starts to speak.
  • Here is our guidance on how to identify speakers in Kaltura's Captions Editor.

Only describe sound effects in your captions if they are relevant to the content of the video. For example, if a video shows someone reacting to a doorbell or telephone ringing.

If the video shows someone ringing a doorbell, there's no need to describe this as it's obvious from the visual element.

Use square brackets to identify sound effects, for example: [doorbell rings]

Reach generates verbatim captions. If the clip features unscripted speech with a lot of hesitations or repeated words, you can edit out them out to improve clarity. When you're listening to unscripted speech, you naturally ignore repeated words or "ums" and "ahs", but if you're reading the same words then it can be harder to make sense of the unedited sentence.

The best way to improve the readability of captions is to edit them so that each caption contains a complete sentence or phrase.

For example:

Less readable:

1/ It is easier to read

2/ captions which contain full 

3/ sentences or phrases than ones that

4/ break them up in the middle

5/ of phrases.

More readable:

1/ It is easier to read captions

2/ which contain full sentences or phrases

3/ than ones that break them up

4/ in the middle of phrases.

The best way to check your captions after you've finished editing them is to watch the video without sound but with captions.

• Can you follow all the speech?
• Do the captions make sense?
• If there's more than one speaker, do you know who is talking?
• If there are sound effects, can you follow the content of the video without the sound effect being described?

There is no spellchecker built into the captions editor. To spellcheck, download the caption file and open in Notepad. Save the file as a TXT file and then open this file in any program with a spellchecker, e.g. Word.