Adding Captions in YouTube

I wanted to caption the car review video, but I hadn't used YouTube's captioning before. First I tried the machine captioning they offer (the feature is in beta.) I think the system had trouble with my voice, because the results aren't very good. Here's some of the highlights:
there's evidence in the middle
it's it's cold and it's plastic your pals
rhonda rowland the vehicle without the Christian
as the car sports history
[…]

the new recruits some fashion
providing extra taxes to the
well the driver's seat
[…]

the sitting position in the back of their
minds even more all right
[…]

no love lost for the ride in this model has
a wheel drive
[…]
I love machine translation errors; they can be so poetic sometimes. I particularly like the line:
the sitting position in the back of their
minds even more all right
But "no love lost for the ride in this model" when it should be: "
"Now while it looks pretty rugged and this model...?!" That's a serious misconception!

Since it's only two minutes long, I decided to transcribe it myself. The YouTube Help center explains that the format should look "something like" this:
0:00:03.490,0:00:07.430
>> FISHER: All right. So, let's begin.
This session is: Going Social

0:00:07.430,0:00:11.600
with the YouTube APIs. I am
Jeff Fisher,
0:00:11.600,0:00:14.009
and this is Johann Hartmann,
we're presenting today.
0:00:14.009,0:00:15.889
[pause]

The Format seems to be:
[start time],[end time]
caption text

where the time is formatted: [h]:[mm]:[ss].[millisecond]
I'm guessing the last part is milliseconds, as it's three digits and not two (two digits would make sense if it were frames)

I copied that format religiously (I thought) and timed everything mostly to the nearest second or half second. It looked like this:
0:00:03.000,0:00:05.000
It’s square
0:00:06.000,0:00:08.000
It opens in the middle
0:00:08.100,0:00:11.500
It’s seats fold and it’s plastic floor repels water
I saved it as a .txt file, and uploaded it through the Captioning and Subtitles interface in YouTube.

Uploading a caption file to YouTube

But when I loaded it in, it didn't work properly; it pretty much displayed the whole file in the first few seconds! Turns out you need to add a return between the end of each line and the next time code, so it should look like this:
0:00:03.000,0:00:05.000
It’s square

0:00:06.000,0:00:08.000
It opens in the middle

0:00:08.100,0:00:11.509
It’s seats fold and it’s plastic floor repels water
Once I did that, it worked perfectly.

Captioned video

I did do some contractions of what was actually said. In reality, I probably didn't need too; it will display a fairly large amount of text  (as witnessed by the very last line.) But when you're captioning for readers, it sometimes pays to cut down on the text - where possible - to make it easier for the reader/viewer to keep up with both the text and visual action.





LINKS
Google Help: Getting Started: Adding/Editing captions
NotesOnVideo: I do a car review

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