Kaltura: Ordering and Editing Captions

This post describes how to request, edit and download closed captions and a transcript file from Kaltura, whether you are working in Moodle or in Mediaspace (https://trincoll.mediaspace.kaltura.com).

Closed captions are machine generated and are typically 70 – 85% accurate, however, the results greatly depend on the clarity and enunciation of the speaker. Turnaround time once captions are requested is typically less than the length of the original media. There is also a built-in caption editor you can use for improving the accuracy of the captions.

1. If you have not already uploaded Media for captioning, upload your media to “My Media.” In Moodle, this is right under the Dashboard:
2. If you are using Mediaspace, click the “guest” button in the upper right corner, and login using your Trinity credentials. When logged in, click “+Add new” and select “Media Upload.”
3. To upload, you can use the on-screen uploader to add a new video or, if you have recorded a screencast using Kaltura Capture, you can upload directly from the tool.
4. Once your video has been uploaded and processed, you will find it in the “My Media” section in either Moodle or MediaSpace. Click on the “Actions” menu, then “Caption & Enrich”.
5. Select the source language for your video or audio, and then click the blue”Submit” button. (Kaltura will not automatically detect languages, and it will only caption in one language at a time.)
6. When the captioning process is complete, reload the page with your video, and you should now see the “CC” button on the player indicating closed captions are available.
7. To edit the captions, go back to the “Caption and Enrich” menu, and click the pencil icon.
8. The on-screen editor allows for editing captions on the left side of the screen while the video plays on the right. You can start and pause the video as necessary while you edit. When you are done editing, be sure to click save.

Editing existing captions

If your video has captions that were uploaded with the video some time prior to February 2021 (i.e. you did not request them using the steps above), you can get to the captions editor this way:

1. Under the Actions menu, choose “Edit”
2. Choose Captions, then the blue “Edit Captions” button.

Downloading caption and transcript files

Once you have created captions you can download the captions as well as a transcript file.  The captions have time stamps for each phrase/sentence while the transcript is just a single block of text without any time codes.

To start click Edit from the actions menu on the media page, then click the Captions tab to see the caption download button and click the Attachments tab to see the transcript download button as shown below. The transcript file that ends in txt is the file you want.