Workflow

The core workflows include:

Starting from Scratch

You've loaded a media asset into Imaginary Captions and you're ready to start creating captions. If you've read through the Captions document, you already know most of what you need to know on the technical side. This document covers the workflow aspect.

Transcription is where you get the basic dialog from the video into a text format. You have three different options:

  1. Machine Transcription
  2. Import Script from Final Draft or Celtx
  3. Manual Transcription
  4. Import Existing Captions

Machine Transcription. The simplest approach is machine transcription, but it requires an in-app purchase or subscription. It's not much money, but it's not free. Machine transcription will submit a copy of your audio track to a cloud provider where it will be transcribed for you. To take advantage of machine transcription, your source video must be in a supported language. Learn more.

Pros: Best combination of tedium-reduction and quality
Cons: Requires an in-app purchase or subscription, not all languages are supported, quality can vary based on the clarity of your dialog

Script Import. Another approach is to import the script for your video. Of course, that assumes your working on a scripted project. We support scripts in either Final Draft (FDX) or Celtx (CXSCRIPT).

Pros: No language restrictions, very accurate dialog capture if what was shot matches the script; Included in the base app
Cons: Timing is always off, if even by a little; only FDX and CXSCRIPT support

Manual Transcription. Manual transcription is where you watch the the video and manually transcribe it line-by-line yourself. When you do this, you end up with a very accurate set of captions and subtitles. Unfortunately, this can be very tedious. Imaginary Captions does a good job of reducing the tedium, but, at the end of the day, you're still manually entering each and every caption.

Pros: The most accurate option, included in the base app
Cons: Mind-numbingly tedious, the option most open to human error

Captions Import. This options is available only if someone else has already done some or all of the work of transcribing your captions and provided them to you in an industry-standard format. You can import these captions and they will show up in your timeline and you can manipulate them like any other set of captions. A common example is if you had captions generated on YouTube and want to use them as a starting point.

Pros: Enables you to leverage existing captions, included in base app, allows you to convert to other formats (e.g. SRT -> WebVTT)
Cons: You actually have to have existing captions

1. Manual Transcription Workflow

The basic approach of the first run is:

In prior documentation, we talked about out points. Here, there's nothing about out points! You can go ahead and set an out point and review your selection prior to building the caption, but the fastest workflow is just to build a caption when you reach the out point. You can always change it later.

If you are really good at remembering dialog (or if you have a script in front of you), you can make a first pass in a single run through the video.

2. Watch

Now you get to see what you have done. Start over at the beginning and hit play. Watch the video all the way through.

It's incredibly unlikely you got everything right in the first pass. But you can get a feel for where any errors and omissions might be.

3. Making Adjustments

The first pass was blunt effort to get the structure of the video right. Now you go through and make sure each individual caption is right. Here are some common adjustments:

In point/Out point Too Early/Too Late
Figure out about how off it is, and then manually enter the desired timecode into the Captions Panel. Then click the caption and press play. It will play from the start of the caption so you can see how it looks.
Text Has typos or Other Errors
Select the caption in the Captions Panel and directly edit the text.
Caption Has Too Many Words
If the caption needs to be split up because there's too much text, you can go to the video point at which you'd like to break it up and hit shift-cmd-c to split the caption at roughly that point. This will delete the old caption and create new timestamps broken at that point. It will attempt to guess at roughly where the dialog is, so you may need to adjust the start/end for the new captions.
One or More Captions Could Be Joined
Let's say you have two captions that are really short and occur right next to one another. It might be better to have them appear as a single caption. Select both in the Captions Panel and enter cmd-shift-j to join them together. The in point from the first will be the new caption's end point, and the end point from the last will be the new end point.

Fixing Existing captions

You may have existing captions that you paid someone to do or, worse, that were automatically generated through some AI source. These captions aren't what you'd like them to be and you'd like to fix them.

Or maybe you have captions in one format and just want them made available in another.

Importing Captions

Imaginary Captions will import captions in the following formats:

File Import
To import a caption from a file, select the video asset and the proper language in your language drop down. Then click Asset | Import Captions.
The dialog box will prompt you to select an .SRT, .VTT, or .AWS file. Note that .AWS is a made up extension. If you have a file from AWS Transcribe, you will need to rename it with a .AWS extension so Imaginary Captions can recognize it.
Copy/Paste
If your captions are entered into an Excel or Numbers or Google Spreadsheets document, you can select the cells, copy them, and then paste them into the Captions Panel. Imaginary Captions expects the cell data to match the format of the Captions Panel.

Making Repairs

Once you've imported the captions, you can work on them as if you had entered them from scratch into Imaginary Captions. You can then export them back into their original format or in other formats.

Translation

There are two approaches to translating captions and subtitles:

  1. Manual
  2. Automated

Imaginary Captions supports both approaches as well as a mix of the two. Using our support for automated translation workflows requires either an in-app Imaginary Captions subscription or in-app credits purchases.

Structure

Each project in Imaginary Captions defines a "media language" and a set of translation languages. The media language should be the primary spoken language of the project's video content. The translation languages are the languages you intend to support by providing captions for those languages.

If multi-lingual support isn't part of your workflow, you can happily ignore all of this and simply define your project's media language.

Manual Workflow

Under a manual workflow, you will see each language associated with your project in the languages drop down in the Captions Panel. You then go through your video and caption each language separately.

Automated Workflow

We support automated workflows using either your cloud provider of choice (currently supporting only Amazon Web Services) or you can work directly though Imaginary Captions. Either way, you will need to make an in-app purchase to enable an automation workflow.