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  5. Panopto – Creating automatic captions/subtitles
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  4. Panopto – Creating automatic captions/subtitles

Panopto – Creating automatic captions/subtitles

IMPORTANT – Please note: If you want auto captioning on lectures recorded before the 2019/20 academic year, iSolutions will need to reprocess the recording. Please raise a ticket to ServiceLine with details of the recording you wish to have reprocessed.

Panopto offers a free captioning service that relies on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology. This is where a computer translates spoken words into text. It can be a bit inaccurate now and then. However, it does provide a great base for quick and easy captions/subtitles for your recordings.

Therefore we advise for situations where accuracy is really needed, that the captions should be checked and edited to ensure they are 100% accurate.

Auto captions are not available immediately after a video has been uploaded and processed. Below, please find the target completion times for the captions.

  • Target completion time for videos one hour or shorter: 8 hours.
  • Target completion time for videos over an hour: One day.

Adding captions

To add auto captions to your session, first locate the session you wish to add captures to, then select the 3 verticle dots icon for more options and select the ‘Edit’ button to bring up the normal Panopto editor.

A Panopto recording showing its options. From left to right. Share. Settings and more Options has been expanded to show Edit. Stats and Delete.

Once in the Panopto editor on the left side menu select the option for ‘Captions’, then select the button for ‘Import captions’.

The Panopto online editor, showing from the left menu options the 'Captions' screen.

From drop down menu list select ‘Import automatic captions’.

Panopto online editor captions screen, showing a dropdown menu with 'Import automatic captions' being selected.

So long as the auto captions are processed (as mentioned previously), they will instantly appear after selecting the import button. At the bottom of this area you will see a text box where you can add more captions should you need to do so.

Panopto online editor captions screen, now showing lots of text captions with timestamp information.

Editing captions

If you spot any errors you can edit them out by double clicking on the caption you wish to change, this will make the text selectable. If you want to completely rewrite the text start typing, otherwise select next to the word you wish to edit and then make the change.

Alternatively selecting the three vertical dots shows another sub menu that allows you to ‘Edit’ or ‘Delete’ the caption entry. The edit button also allows you to adjust the time that the caption will show in the video.

Panopto online editor captions screen highlighting a text caption being edited.

Once happy with the made alterations press the return key on your keyboard and it will show the change.

Panopto online editor captions screen showing the change in the captions.

To save the changes go to top right and select the blue ‘Apply’ button and close the editor page when prompted.

Panopto online editor captions screen highlighting the blue 'Apply' button.

The video will now be available with captions available for playback. Sessions with captions available can be identified by the CC logo under the session title.

A Panopto session showing under its title the CC icon.

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