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 vertical dots icon for more options and select the ‘Edit’ button to bring up the normal Panopto editor.
Once in the Panopto editor on the left side menu select the option for ‘Captions’, then select the button for ‘Import captions’.
From drop down menu list select ‘Import automatic captions’.
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.
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.
Once happy with the made alterations press the return key on your keyboard and it will show the change.
To save the changes go to top right and select the blue ‘Apply’ button and close the editor page when prompted.
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.
Removing Captions
If you use Panopto for language assessment, you may wish to remove automated captions. Do not remove captions from your videos routinely as this is not good accessibility practice.
You can tell when a video has captions as a CC icon will appear in the bottom right of the video tumbnail. You may need to wait for several minutes after the recording as finished processing before captions are generated.
- Hover over the video in the video library, and select the Settings button.
- Select Captions.
- Existing captions will appear under Available Captions.
- Select the lanaguage English (united Kingdom) to see the caption details.
- Select Delete Captions and then confirm.
- You may need to refresh your page. The CC icon should no longer show on the image thumbnail and the captions button will appear greyed out when playing the video.