compressed with Sorenson Squeeze at 360 kbps video, 96 kbps audio. I made the frame size larger to ensure that the titles would be legible.
also available for download via BitTorrent on Prodigem
Kevin McLeod recently wrote to the videoblogging list, asking us to subtitle our videos (where reasonably possible) to make them accessible to the deaf. I didn't think it would be easy, but wanted to experiment to see just how difficult it is. Subtitling is interesting for handling different languages as well; if we really want to communicate with the whole world, we'll sooner or later have to deal with subtitling (or dubbing).
I chose the Spankyville video to subtitle because it has very little dialogue - whereas many of my videos have none at all! So transcribing it was quick and easy. I didn't transcribe absolutely literally, left out ums and ahs and repetitions, and squeezed things down. I realized that if I subtitled every spoken word, the viewer wouldn't be able to read quickly enough to keep up.
NB for new viewers: "Spankyville" also has a running soundtrack, the song "Our House" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - lyrics here. The original post with an explanation of the setting and circumstances of this video is here.
Although I've been using Roxio Easy Media Creator 7's VideoWave for video editing lately, I decided to do the subtitling in Windows Movie Maker, whose title/caption feature I find easier to use.
It's tricky to figure out where to cut the lines to fit the soundtrack and the action (though in this video most of the speaking is off-camera, so there aren't many places where I had to precisely fit the subtitle with what you see). But it was an interesting linguistic challenge, kinda fun, and didn't take so terribly long. I can't promise I'll be able to keep this up for every video I do, but... I'll try.
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