Tag: YouTube

YouTube captioning with Adobe Premiere

I use Adobe Premiere Pro to make captions for my YouTube videos easily.

My current workflow uses Camtasia to do the screen captures. I’m still learning so I’ll probably get more efficient as I go.

Once I’ve got a draft of the video ready, I export it from Camtasia into an MP4. I take that video and load it into Adobe Premiere Pro and use its closed captioning features to get a transcript of the audio. I can revise the script inside of Premiere.

Premiere will play back the video with a text cursor tracking the video. This makes it possible to stay synchronized when I re-record the audio with Audacity. (Even if I’ve made changes to the script.) My initial audio recording has a lot of keypress noises that I want to get rid of.

There is an advantage to importing the audio from Audacity’s .MP3: if I need to correct the audio later, I just need to change the MP3 itself. Camtasia imports the audio anew each time it starts. If I respect timing, the final audio will get my adjustments automagically. This is even true if I’ve split up the audio and rearranged it. One example of a later stage adjustment is to remove breath sounds. I still am learning audio recording techniques.

Once I have the video completely finished and ready to upload to YouTube, I load the MP4 into Premiere again and create a final transcription of the video. I edit it to correct voice recognition errors and to improve punctuation. This preserves the synchronization between the text and the video. I then export the captions into an .SRT file. This is much less work than trying to create the captions manually.

Once I’ve uploaded the video to YouTube, I go to the edit captions section and upload the saved captions. I play the captions through and use YouTube’s interface to correct the errors that I didn’t notice inside of Premiere. This is my first effort at this process: The Symbols Section of Words’s Equation Tab.

It’s nice to have several tools available at once.

Animation and communication

I’m working on a tool to help me do animation. My underlying technology is HTML and JavaScript. I’m trying to apply some of the principles of traditional animation to my process. The primary target for the tool is math explainers.

One idea from traditional animation that seems important is the idea of creating keyframes while drafting a presentation. In an animation, the keyframes would be images with gaps between them that would be filled in by artists as they create the continuity of the motion. I could apply this idea by making still images of important stages in the product. Then, I can do the magic of making things move smoothly with polish and flair. However, when the animation is generated algorithmically, the keyframes might be similar to an advanced storyboard.

Making a storyboard would also be helpful for planning. I could make (paper) sketches of where I want the narrative to go. However, I haven’t tried this for my current video, even though it probably should be the first thing I do. I’ve been so enamored with the animation software development that that’s been a distraction from my ultimate goal.

Another (potential) idea from storytelling is that the outline is often structured in a three-act framework. I don’t really have an intuition about how to apply that idea to communicate mathematics. It sounds promising, but I haven’t explored it yet. Part of my uncertainty is my lack of experience in analyzing the three-act structure.

Animation can be a really useful tool. I don’t want to lose sight that it is just a tool and should not override the process of communication. It’s so easy to get excited about animating things in a pretty way. I also want to explain each topic effectively.

This summer, Grant Sanderson, the creator behind the YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown, sponsored a math exposition contest. His announcement of the winners shared some principles that he used evaluate the submissions.

My understanding of his discussion about the contest is that first, the information should have a motivation. Why is the information interesting? What about the topic is meaningful to the videographer? He also wanted the videos to have clarity, empathy and to be engaging. Clarity requires the video to be succinct and direct. To me, empathetic means that the video should talk to its audience. It should be aware of difficult concepts and acknowledge the difficulty. Engaging means that the audience should want to pay attention to the explanation.

Other attributes that he used to evaluate submissions to the contest was whether the videos had good quality, novelty and were memorable. To me, quality means that the chosen tools are effective and used skillfully. Novelty means that the ideas should include something new. Perhaps a new explanation, an insight that unlocks the topic to a larger audience or that it is just different. Memorable content allows the important ideas to stick with the viewer.

I think these concepts are good benchmarks to aspire to in my releases.

Sometimes a video is a good way to present the information. At other times, the ideas are better shown with a document or an interactive website. Of course, these can all be used together. Animation can help a video contain these attributes from the contest. The right information for the right audience might need more than animation technology.