I used YouTube’s “Captions and Subtitles” feature to upload a subtitle file. I hand-coded the subtitle file in BBEdit using the subtitle (.sub) format. To view the video with captions, click the up-arrow button on the bottom-right corner of the screen and choose CC, English: English captions.
I am thrilled to be a part of this. My Flickr friend, Jon Gilbert Leavitt (jglsongs on Flickr), asked if he could use my photo Rainbow Flag Above Me in this video to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first gay pride parade that occurred after the Stonewall Rebellion. A longtime gay activist of sorts, I wrote a paper on the Stonewall Rebellion for a history class in my senior year of high school in 1985. Now, 24 years later, I’m contributing again to the commemoration of this important historic event. Enjoy the video and the song written by Jon and sung by his partner and another artist. Watch for my photo in the montage near the end.
When I signed on to YouTube this morning, I noticed a new feature called Annotations that allows you to add Speech Bubbles, Notes, and Spotlights to your videos. I realized right away that the first two of these types of annotations gave me a way to caption my videos. They don’t allow for “closed” captioning; everyone who views the video sees them by default. There is a mechanism people can use, though, to turn them off while viewing them by clicking on the Menu button at the bottom of the player.
This morning, I captioned a video that I recorded on Mother’s Day. At the time of this writing, it seems that you can only see the captions if you view the video on YouTube. YouTube says that, once they get this feature out of beta, they will support embeds, meaning that the annotations will show up when videos are shared in blogs, on Facebook, and the like.
Although it was time-consuming (it took me about 45 minutes to an hour to caption a one-minute-forty-five-second [1:45] video), the graphical user interface (GUI) was rather intuitive. From my first experience using YouTube’s Annotations, I am certainly willing to use them again. Hooray for an easier way to caption videos!
