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Working With Video Captions That Contain Special Characters

Markette Pierce Updated by Markette Pierce

Working With Video Captions That Contain Special Characters

3Play does not support the use of special characters — M-dashes, accents, foreign characters, etc. — and so special care must be taken when working with video transcripts that need these characters. 

Work in 3Play

  1. Apply standard copy edits to the caption in 3Play following these instructions. 
  2. Save your edits and Finalize File. 
Note: Each time Finalize File is clicked, the transcript is synced with Kaltura, overwriting what is currently stored there.
  1. Tag the edited transcript file using DONOTEDIT, which will alert others editing files not to overwrite the manually edited file that is stored on Kaltura.
    1. From the My Files area of 3Play, search for and locate the video you’ve just copy edited.
    2. Check the box to the left of the file to select it.
    3. Click the Tag button with the file selected.
    4. Select the DONOTEDIT tag, and click Update.
    5. You are now done working on this file in 3Play.

Manage Files in Kaltura and Edit Files Locally

  1. Log in to Kaltura. 
  2. Find the videoID you were working with. 
  3. Click Captions from the navigation menu on the left, under the video thumbnail. 
  4. Click the three dots to the far right, and select Download. 
  5. The SRT file will download with a random name. Rename the downloaded SRT file with the VideoID.
  6. Open the file and make any edits related to special characters.
  7. Save the file. 
  8. Back in Kaltura, return to the captions menu for the file you’ve edited, if you are no longer there.
  9. Click + Add Caption.
  10. Click the Upload File button from the pop-up, select the file you edited, and click Open. Then click Add Caption to add the edited caption to the video in Kaltura.
  11. The top file, the one with “Saved” as its status and “Default Caption” appearing is the old, unedited file. Click the three dots to the right of that file and select Delete.
  1. Click the blue Save button.

Store Edited Captions in Wrike and Note in AA Course Maintenance

Because clicking Finalize File in 3Play will sync the file that does not have the special characters in it, we want to maintain a copy of the edited SRT files that live outside of Kaltura. 

  1. Upload any SRT files you manually edited to contain special characters to the “Copy Edit Captions” Wrike task for the course project. 
  2. Add a note to the AA Course Maintenance page that says “SRT files contain special characters and were manually edited and uploaded to Kaltura. Find copies in <this Wrike task>.” Link the words “this Wrike task” to the “Copy Edit Captions” Wrike task where you uploaded the edited SRT files. 

How did we do?

5. Implement QA Edits

Copy Edit Captions in SubPLY

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