This summer we have had several improvements to videos. Videos are hosted in Kaltura, though most of you probably thought of the videos as “living” in Blackboard. They now “live” in Canvas, but still on Kaltura. We’ve also changed some of the back-end so that auto captioning is even more accurate. This will save you some time fixing those few things the computer was unable to parse out.

When you login to Canvas and select your course you have the option “My Media” If you click on that you will be able to see all your videos already in Kaltura, as shown in the photo below. At the top near right there is an option to “add new”. If you select that you can upload any video files you have.

Once you have selected “add new” you will see the screen below. You are given the option to either drag and drop your file or choose the file on your computer.

Once you have uploaded a video you will see the screen below. You can also access this screen when you first login to My Media. On the far right of the screen by each video there is a small grey graph, pencil, and trashcan. Selecting the pencil which is the edit screen will also take you to this screen. From this screen you have the option to “Launch Editor”. This editor will allow you to do some light editing to the video

When you select “Launch Editor” you will see a screen like the one below. It will give you time codes and you can goto a spot to to split the video or delete sections. This can be useful if you had a few “oops” moments.

After you are happy with your video you can then work on captions. Captions will be auto generated using an AI. They will come out at around 90% accuracy. Then you need to edit them. Once processed you can goto My Media and click on the video. You will then see the screen below. Below the video is a dropdown menu called actions, select it.

The dropdown menu will expand with several options, select caption and enrich as shown below.

You will then see the existing requests and status completed. To the right of status is a grey pencil to edit, select it.

Now you will be in the captions editor. You can correct anything the AI was unable to catch and add proper punctuation. You can also add speakers if you had an interview or several speakers in the video. Once you are done, remember to select save. You can come back and edit captions later.

A final thing to check is to goto My Media and then select the grey edit button on the far right. Under the video there is an option for captions, select it. You will then see the caption file or .srt. On the far right of action you want to make sure that “show on player is selected. It is the furthest option on the right. If you do not select this, your captions will not show up when you embed your video.

Fall 2020 will be unlike any Fall semester any of us has known. Coming off a remote learning Spring and still in the middle of a pandemic, many courses will be taught using zoom this Fall. For those who will be using zoom for live sessions here are the recommendations from COLRS

1. Please record your session and as soon as possible after the session has ended upload it to Kaltura within Canvas.
2. Campus IT has enabled autocaptioning of uploaded videos. This means that after your zoom session (or other recorded media) is uploaded an AI engine will create captions for the video. The accuracy will be somewhere near the 90% mark.
3. We will have a banner (image below) across all videos which reads, “If captions of this video are required, please contact captions@UIS.edu.”
4. For those students who require captions at the higher 99% accuracy COLRS will monitor this email and be working to help provide those captions in a timely manner.

This is my 37th blog post, and my 8th on videos. I have talked about evidence based video lengths, correcting captions on YouTube videos you don’t control, audio descriptions, captioning, and getting a clean transcript from a caption file. Today I’d like to write about how to improve the overall quality of a video, and the answer is scripting.

I have worked on, and sat through many videos which are, to a certain extent, improv. This means that the creator sat down cold, and began recording all in one sitting. The video portion could have a talking head, or a PowerPoint, a screen recording, a drawing, or even show some sort of event or chemical reaction. In a video like this there could be a lot of filler words like um, ah, ok, a… Or perhaps there are interjections based on occurrences during the recording such as running out of ink, trying to find the proper tab for a function in the software, or yelling at someone in the house that the laundry is upstairs. For the student this can be distracting. And for those of us who don’t like hearing our own voices in a recording, it can make us cringe even more to hear, in our own voice, “someone let the dog out, um ah, where was I?”

An effective way to decrease these instances is to write a script for the video. Take the time to write down what you plan to say. Edit it a few times. And then read the script during the recording. Depending on your setup, you may want to print it out or have it displayed on an extra monitor. I recommend increasing the font size so it is easier to read as well. Doing this will decrease the ums, ahs, and oks. It cannot prevent a barking dog, but it can allow you to scrap the recording with the barking dog, and not worry about where you were to say what you meant to say. It will also give you an initial transcript of the video. Depending on how you are captioning your videos, you might also be able to upload the transcript and allow your video hosting platform to sync it.

To upload an .srt file in Canvas, go to My Media.  Next to the video you would like to add captions to, click the greyed out pencil highlighted below with the red arrow.

You will then be on a screen with 9 options below your video, one of them is captions.  Click captions

You will now see a blue button on the far left, “upload caption file”, click it.

Then a new box will pop up.  Browse for the file.  Select the language.  And give it a label.  If the language is English, “English” would be a good label.  Then click save.