Monday, February 24, 2014

Settings box in Subtitles Editor

We have added a settings box to our online subtitles editor. For now, this box can come handy primarily in these 2 situations:
  1. I want to start playing my media file a little bit earlier. This is done by selecting a "pre-play" value from the settings box. Then the media file will always start playing from: time() - pre-play_time
  2. I want to disable the speaker segmentation. If you don't like the speaker segmentation (diarization), you can disable it. It means that all segments will be uniformly colored and the speaker id won't be shown.
The settings values are reset when the subtitles editor is loaded. By default the pre-play time is set to 0 seconds and showing of the speaker segmentation is enabled.

We hope you will take advantage of these new features!

You can try the settings box in our demo at:
http://spokendata.com/demo/start

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Use-Case: Making movie subtitles in 4 steps

Let's go through 4 easy steps for making subtitles from scratch for a movie or your home/company video. Subtitles are usually stored in a text file with time stamps to synchronize the text with the video. Examples of such text formats are SRT or TT.

You need to have a software for making the subtitles (unless you want to edit the text file directly). You have several choices - to download a desktop application (AHD Subtitles Maker Professional, ...), use a web service (http://CaptionsMaker.com, http://amara.org, http://SubtitleHorse.com), or use a smart web service as http://SpokenData.com.

What is the difference between standard and smart web service for making captions? You need to set the timing of each particular subtitle by yourself (example here). And this can be pretty annoying job. And that is where the smart web service for making caption can help you - it will find the places where speech occurs automatically! So you need just to fill in the text. Pretty good right?

So what are the steps you need to do?