Posts Tagged GopherX.net
YouTube Captioning: An Easier Way
Posted by ScottAlbert in Ashes Production Blog, Business of Web Series on June 9th, 2011
There are many reasons for adding closed captions to your videos on YouTube. And not only for the obvious reason: so that the hard of hearing can still enjoy your show. While no one has come right out and said this, I suspect that the captions help YouTube understand the content of your video much better. And YouTube is one of the few (maybe the only) video sharing site that has a closed captions functionality.
We’ve got 180 episodes in Tights and Fights: Ashes, and between improvisation on the set and tweaking stuff in the editing, the finished episode is far enough off the script that we can’t just copy and paste. YouTube has a function that automatically creates closed captions, and I’ve heard that for other people’s shows it gives you a pretty good start on captioning the episode. They claim that all they have to do is download the text, edit some of the missed words, and re-upload it. Well… that never worked for us. The machine generated closed captions came out just gobble-de-gook.
That means we have to transcribe our show by hand. All ten plus hours of it.
At first this was a daunting task. It is almost impossible to make a text file to upload to YouTube from scratch. We tried doing this when we first started uploading episodes, but the first one took poor Marlon a whole day. To do one episode. We couldn’t keep doing that. So it wasn’t until we were contacted by an advocate for the hard of hearing, around episode 80, that we turned our attention back to it.
That’s when we found it: http://yt-subs.appspot.com/
This web app, while a little confusing at first glance, turns the task of creating subtitles into an easy, breezy one that many of the people who help us out actually enjoy doing.
Here’s a quick rundown of how it works…
1) Click on “Add Subtitles”
You’ll be asked to log in using your Google credentials. Really all you’re doing is giving YT-Subs access to your YouTube videos. If you have multiple accounts, like we do, make sure you sign in with the account that uploaded the video you are going to subtitle. The importance of this will be clear at the very end of the process, but by then it’ll be too late.
2) You’ll be on the Dashboard. Click “New Video”
You’ll come to a screen that you can pick your video. For us, because we’re mostly working on the latest video we have uploaded, it’s right there, waiting for us to click it. If you have many videos, and you don’t see the one you want right away, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to find it.
Click on the video you want. It’s info will drop down. Click the “Add” button down near the bottom.
3) Transcribe
Great, now you’re on step one of the four step transcription process. On this page, you can watch the video and write out the text as you go.
Try to write the text into chunks. Break them up as much as possible. In the next stages, you’ll be matching the text to times in the video. It takes a little while to get a sense of the right lengths for your text. When you’re just starting out, just try to remember to break up the text at natural pauses in the video.
Hit “Save and Process”
4) Process
Here’s where the app will show you the actual blocks of text that will get matched to the video. You’ll see that if you have blocks of text that are too long to fit on the screen all at once, the app will break them up into smaller chunks. You can’t change anything in this tab. If you see something that’s wrong or you don’t like the way the app broke up the text, you’ll have to go back to the Transcribe tab and edit the text to your liking, and then hit “Save and Process” again until you are happy with it all.
Hit “Save and Sync”
5) Sync
This is the fun part.
Just below the video is the first subtitle, that the app is waiting to sync to the video. Find the yellow lightning bolt. See it? Click it with the mouse and hold it down. That sets the in point for your subtitle. Wait until you want it to end, and let go. That one subtitle is now synced and the next one is on deck. Just click down on the lightning bolt when you want it to start, hold it, and let go when you want it to end.
It’s that easy.
Sometimes you’ll find that the subtitles don’t quite work as you had hoped. If you need to, you can click back to the Transcribe Tab and rejig things, which means you’ll have to go through the following two steps again.
Or, if you just want to tweak the times, the in point and out point for the subtitle are the timecode numbers under the image to the right.
There’s a few other ways to adjust the subtitles and times, but that’s the basics and the slightly more advanced stuff is pretty easy to figure out if you play with the interface for a few moments.
When you’re done, hit “Save” (the button above the subtitles to the far left) and then click on the “Publish” Tab.
6) Publish
Okay, here’s where you add the subtitles to YouTube.
If you have logged in with the correct account, the one that uploaded the video, you can just hit “Upload” and YTSubs saves the subtitles to the video and within moments they should be there for everyone to see!
If there’s a problem adding the subtitles to YouTube, the process to get them there is slightly more tricky, but only slightly. Click “Donwload” and save the file to your computer. Log on to Youtube and go to your Videos and Playlist area. Find your video, and click “Captions.” Select “Add New Captions or Transcript.” Hit “Browse,” find the file and upload it. Make sure the correct transcription file is checkmarked – that’s the one that will play by default. And that’s it!
Enjoy!
YouTube 300 View Controversy! | Business of Web Series
Posted by ScottAlbert in Business of Web Series on January 8th, 2011
I came across this interesting bit of information today.
We got a report about optimizing our YouTube channel for TightsandFights. This one piece of advice was news to me, and I thought I would share it with you all.
It seems that it is not uncommon for YouTube videos view statistics to freeze once they hit the 300 mark. Your video continues to play, but the view counts don’t go up. Eventually, the video unfreezes, and the counts go up again.
Like many other things about why Youtube works (or sometimes doesn’t work) the way it does, there’s very little hard information about this. Is it a glitch? Is it part of the the design? There’s much speculation that once your videos hit 300 views, a different way of counting views kicks in (to try to head of fraudulent view counts). Some feel strongly that you will actually lose your views during that time. Others feel, just as strongly, that eventually your view count will catch up, and no views are lost, only delayed in being reported.
What’s weird about working with YouTube is that you’re very much flying blind – it’s difficult to understand how things work, and why. YouTube and Google are both notoriously difficult to communicate with, and they deliberately keep details of their business secret – even from clients and costumers. This week, a cautionary story floated around my twitter circle about the dangers of working with YouTube…
http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/11/columns/guest/winter/index.htm
He describes essentially being fired by a YouTube algorithm. Is that our future?
It makes it difficult to earn money off of web series when you’re uncertain of such fundamental information as whether or not YouTube counts a view as a view. Which raises the question that consumes hundreds of hours of web series producers’ time – why stick with YouTube? That’s a whole post in itself, but as long as YouTube is the first and often only place the casual viewer goes to find new stuff to watch, GopherX.net is going to be there. Sure, other sites have better players or widgets, but if you’re serious about making some money doing video and transmedia storytelling, YouTube’s the only true game in town.
If you’d like to read a little more about the 300 Video View Freeze controversy, here’s where I got a bunch of my information…
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=085169998178ca55&hl=en
Live Super Hero Transmedia Performance on Thursday!
Posted by ScottAlbert in Ashes Production Blog, Business of Web Series, Show News, Tights and Fights on December 7th, 2010
Hello! Scott, here.
The last couple of days have been both tiring and kinda impressive, if I do say so myself. We’ve been shooting, launching and promoting episodes, all at the same time!
But I wanted to jump on here and invite you all to our live Transmedia twitter performance this Thursday (December 9th) at 7:00 PM EST!
Our super hero characters will be acting out a short scene in their lives from 7:00 to 8:00. We try to do three every month, that means we’ll have a performance most Thursdays at the same time.
Please join us! You can read more about what’s going on in this Thursday’s performance here on our site!
Transmedia Storytelling Tools
Posted by ScottAlbert in Ashes Production Blog, Business of Web Series on December 3rd, 2010
Hello everyone! Scott here!
Every day I say I’m going to post what we have learned and what bumps we have hit here on this blog. But every day I don’t get quite that far down my To-Do list.
And guess what!? We’re shooting tomorrow! Yep, we’re just that crazy that we’ve started round two of our production cycle in early December in Canada. Lucky for us, Toronto is barely Canada on the best of days so weather wise we should be okay.
So wish us luck, but what I wanted to talk a bit about today was the tools we are using to run our transmedia. We’ve been pushing hard to add more and more live transmedia experience to our show, whether twitter or Facebook or whatever. And what we have discovered is… it’s hard. 
And there aren’t many tools out there designed to do what we do – tell a story in real time using Social Media. And so through trial and error we are slowly figuring out what works for us. Here’s a list with some pros and cons…
TweetChat
http://tweetchat.com/room/tightsandfights
TweetChat takes your hashtag and uses it to make a chatroom that updates in real time. It’s pretty neat. We’re trying to use it for our live twitter performances. Sadly, the two times we have tried to make use of it, it hasn’t worked so well. The first time, all use of hashtags in Toronto didn’t work and we had to cancel our performance. The second time, it sucked in all the posts well enough, but it didn’t post them if you wrote them through the TweetChat. Very disappointing, but at least we kept going. We’re going to do some tests, but it still seems like the best way to have all the posts and a way for people to jump in all in one place.
HootSuite
Sure, I’m not cracking any secrets of the web by mentioning Hootsuite, but you what – Hootsuite is the only twitter client that doesn’t slow, stall or crash my computer.
The biggest problem is keeping an eye on our 16 twitter feeds, as well as 6 Facebook pages, 7 blogs, 8 YouTube channels and one website. It can be overwhelming. But let’s just stick to twitter for now. Hootsuite was doing well at first, even through I hadn’t quite figured out how to best organize it to see in a glance everything I need to see. But then they went to a paid model, so I went in search of a free client that replaced HootSuite. None of them did. To me, HootSuite’s killer feature is it’s easy to use scheduled tweets. And, oh yeah, it doesn’t crash.
I’ve gone back to the free version, which only allows you have 5 social networks. This limitation turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as it led me to try having two accounts. Nothing has made my life easier than using the two accounts to organize all those feeds. Character feeds go into one account, all other feeds into the other. It means lots less clicking around in slow loading tabs to see who is interacting to whom, and who is saying what. But that’s not all I use…
Seesmic Desktop
Seesmic filled in for Hootsuite for a short time, and I fell in love with the one thing Hootsuite doesn’t have – having all your accounts updates dhow up in one column. So I can glance at it and see if anyone is talking to me (or my characters) and then I can dig into the individual account to talk back.
One of the smaller things I don’t like about it, there’s not much way to control what shows up in the constant visual twitter updates in the corner of my screen. Why can’t a twitter client realize there are some tweets I consider important and others I don’t need to know about?
The big drawback on Seesmic? Add too many columns and it drags your computer to a halt. Granted, some of the problems I thought I was having with it I traced to another program, so I’ll keep playing with it and if it turns out it wasn’t at all effecting my computer’s performance, I’ll let you know.
But without a way to schedule tweets, it can never be the only twitter client I use.
But the one thing that is the biggest (and most surprising help) is…
Yoono
It’s main purpose is be a twitter client type interface for YouTube, IM, Facebook and others, including twitter. It doesn’t really do that very well, in my opinion. It is its secondary function that has turned my life around.
Since Google and YouTube is now one, every time I need to log into a character’s YouTube page, it logs me out of gmail, google docs, etc. And it is a pain to go through the five steps required to log in to YouTube from a different account. With Yoono in my Firefox browser, there’s a drop down menu that not only lets me switch between YouTube account with a single click – each tab can be logged into a Google/YouTube account of its own! I can be logged into my Gmail and multiple character’s YouTube pages simultaneously. I can’t stress enough how this has simplified my daily work flow.
The same thing works for twitter. Before, to be logged into multiple Twitter accounts at once, I needed to use multiple browsers and even multiple computers! Now, with Yoono’s Firefox extension, I can log in to different Twitter accounts in each tab.
It doesn’t work flawlessly. Sometimes it seems to get confused over which account I want it to use. And you must remember to switch back to the global profile before logging out. But those minor problems don’t even begin to stack up against the added ease that Yoono has given me.
Those are the big tools that I’m using to help navigate all the networks we’re using. My system is continuing to develop, so I’ll post more here if something big gets added to my arsenal.
Gotta go! We’re shooting at first light (short days in December!) and the club music from downstairs is getting louder. I can’t decided which of those are better reasons to go home.
Exciting Annoucement Time!
Posted by ScottAlbert in Ashes Production Blog, Latest News, Tights and Fights on November 2nd, 2010
Hold your applause until the-- Nah, go ahead!
Hola, Scott here!
It’s been a while since I last posted any actual news here – there was a lot more time to do stuff like that before we started posting episodes! We hope that you’re enjoying them, we’re pretty exciting to be sharing them with you.
But actually, we’ve got a few announcements, and they are interrelated, so I thought that I might as well put them into this one post. So here goes!
Bump Two Filming starts in December!
That’s right. The sixty episodes that we have already shot, and are currently releasing online, only takes us a third of the way through the story. We have are moving ahead on production of the next sixty!
What can you expect from them? How about time travel, monkeys, ninjas, split personalities, Fantabulous Gal as a cleaning service mogul, an evil robot invasion of Leopardia – Leopard Woman’s kingdom in the middle of the planet, The Plumber goes undercover… and much much more!
We’re going into prep in November, just as we’re approaching our official launch on November 12. Busy, busy month – we hope you think it is worth it!
Okay, on to related exciting annoucement #2!
Table Read for Bump Two is tomorrow!
For the second time, we’re gathering all of our cast and key crew together to hear all the scripts from Bump Two out loud. This is a crucial testing ground for jokes and storylines – trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. What needs to be punched up and what needs to be left alone, even though the joke may not be fresh to you two years after you wrote it.
The table read is also a nice chance to have everyone gathered in one spot – one of the few times that this happens for our oversize, sprawling production.
We’ll let you know how it goes! And then it’s on to the punch up room sessions, where the scripts get rewritten (again) and many laughs spill out of the boardroom here at the Gopher Hole.
And speaking of writing, here’s related and exciting announcement #3!
Live Transmedia Performances Start This Week!
Some of you who follow our characters on twitter or YouTube have already noticed they have started chatting with each other, and the occasional ‘civilian.’ That’s what we call our ‘low intensity’ Transmedia activities – and we’re only just getting our feet wet with those. But this week, we’ll be doing our first, live Transmedia performance!
Because we’re thinking of this as a bit of a test run, I’m not going to give you any times or dates here. Rest assured, if you follow us on Twitter, you’ll get more info. (If you don’t – why not?) This first performance will be low key, and low stress, but as we get our sea legs you’ll be hearing a lot more about these performances – and you’ll see why we call this show the most Transmedia story ever told!
The real fun part of these performances is that you can join in! We’re looking to get our audience to be as involved with how the plot unfolds us the characters themselves. It’s like an improvised scene that anyone can be a part of! Exciting, no?
So that’s it for the announcements right now. But watch this space – there’ s plenty of surprises still to come!
Who’s Kim?
Posted by ScottAlbert in Ashes Production Blog, Show News, Tights and Fights on October 31st, 2010
Fantabulous Gal does some serious rationalizing when she moves into her ex-boss’s apartment while DynaGal’s in the loony bin.
We finally get another check in from Fantabulous Gal! She needs a place to stay, her old boss is catatonic… sounds perfect, n’est pa?
“Oh sorry, Gone With The Wind, now you’re mine.”
Posted by ScottAlbert in Ashes Production Blog, Show News, Tights and Fights on October 31st, 2010
Leopard Woman celebrates her promotion as head of Ronin Force.
Leopard Woman has a good day, except for Major Hubby’s bitterness. The only real problem is that now she might actually have to start looking for the missing Captain Euchre…
Cause you asked for it… More Plumber!
Posted by ScottAlbert in Ashes Production Blog, Tights and Fights on October 31st, 2010
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Robert Strovesco begins to understand a little more about how the internet works and explains why man in his forties is once again living with his mom. It’s all that Captain Euchre’s fault and he’s gonna pay!
Once The Plumber has figured out that the YouTube is for every you out there, he lets us on how his life has been going lately… disastrously!
Our Official Launch is NOVEMBER 12!
Posted by ScottAlbert in Ashes Production Blog, Business of Web Series, Tights and Fights on October 30th, 2010
Are you ready to party like a super hero?
First of all, we want to thank you so much for watching. We are so grateful for every view we get, and despite all the work and long hours, every time we get a positive comment from the far side of our computer monitors, it’s all worthwhile.
We launched our first teaser episode on October 1st, and we had our soft launch on October 15th. As of the writing of this post, we’re only on episode 8 of 180 and still slowly rolling out all the exciting elements that is the totally of the Tights and Fights: Ashes experience!
And so, we’re pleased to announce officially that our official launch of Tights and Fights: Ashes is on November 12th! What does this mean to you, our dear beloved viewers and fans? It means you’ll finally get to see our official website – the ‘hub’ of our show’s online experience.
And for us, we’re going to have a party to celebrate with our cast, crew, supporters and friends that very night!
So mark it down on your calendar – November 12th is going to be a big day for us, we hope that you’ll come by the website and tell us what you think!
Thanks for making this show such a special experience for us!
