Intervention 1

I encountered a variety of issues in the creation/generation of the captions for this project. In summary, here they are:
1. MAGpie does not work reliably. When it does work, it is cool. However, I will never sit down to work with MAGpie again unless I have many hours in a chunk--and then I will export and save the file in quick time and expect to never be able to access it in MAGpie again. No, this is not hyperbole. Perhaps it is a demonstration of my technical incompetence, but I'm only willing to invest so much time in learning a system before it is a waste--easier to move on to the next potential.

2. Jubler did not look friendly enough in terms of the instructions provided. I need to explore it more. However, it does open up qt files in a more friendly way than Subtitle Workshop. Jubler at least showed all of the captioned text, but it lost the line breaks and replaced them with spaces. Frustrating a bit, but it is nothing that can't be resolved eventually.

3. Subtitle Workshop has a great help menu, and it is superb for matching timeframes with captions. It took a little bit to get used to--not as intuitive as MAGpie--but I like it better. Plus SW opened up my files much more reliably than MAGpie. However, when I exported files into QT format with linebreaks, they were lost. Same thing happened when I imported files into SW that were in QT format. Again, a bit frustrating. However, for this project, I was able to generate exactly what I needed.

Please note, that the above version on YouTube does not feature the line breaks that I wanted--instead there are spaces and the lines run too long and layover with the YouTube logo. Obviously this is harder to read and it interferes with comprehension. So, it is not my best work--but it is functional. Frankly, I think just generating more material with decently done captions is a good aim. Then the work can be honed. At least that's what I think now.

4. Learning to use the text editor, not word processor, was vital.

Here ends the discussion of the various editors. Main point: when using free software, be willing and ready to shift software and file formats, and realize doing so will lose you some work--so save everything with a decent file naming protocol!

5. From this project I learned a bunch of things/did a bunch of things:
I zipped files (never did that before);
I hopped software platforms better than I ever thought I could with minimal panic (compared to normal gz response to stress);
I can follow directions;
Valuable resources exist out there--it's a matter of figuring out who knows how to access those resources most efficiently;
There is an endless ocean of material which needs to be made accessible;
There is something very cool about captioning somebody else's material;
I actually have a mild interest in possibly learning to code;
The easiest way to learn is by doing.