More Fitness Video Captions

I've selected two more fitness-related videos to caption. They are both Sonnon videos. Like my initial project, I've selected these because I am using parts of his system, and I find personal investment to be a strong motivator. Additionally, I'm working with material which interests and educates me in things I care about.

The first video centers on some of the basic principles of working with clubbells. I selected this because it provides basic clubbell concepts/principles, I've never worked with clubbells, and generating captioned material around basic or foundational principles is a means to introduce a broader audience to material than focusing on high-end or specialized knowledge. If folks can't get the basics, what chance is there that they'll bother to look at the advanced materials. Here it is:





The second video is a direct motivational training blog. This blog had low-audio levels, and I think that may have inhibited the number of people who listened to the whole thing. Additionally, I am interested in motivational speaking as well as fitness training; transcribing this presentation proved interesting.



I've also found that I can transcribe pretty solid drafts at about 20 words per minute when the speaking is consistent. Not bad--at least from my view. I haven't been doing this too long, so I'm happy with the progress I've made today. I am not sure when I will have time to work on the next couple stages. However, I am glad that I've started both of these. Clocking the basic caption time frames is the next phase.

My theoretical grounding for these actions is this: if I, a pretty busy doctoral student and teacher with limited tech savvy can be guided through the initial stages of captioning and end up, after about 10-20 hours of solid work and effort, able to fly solo and caption material, then others can go through the same effort. Rather than having captioning appear or seem to be out of the reach of others, by generating and working on the materials, we can make it much more real. And if we do this on a variety of content--not just the most popular content, but content we care about--we will hopefully connect with other viewers and readers who are equally interested and engaged in the material. Then, perhaps, a few of them will decide that they, too, want to work on the same project and join in.

Who knows. But I do like the idea that my efforts benefit others as well as myself and contribute to my professional, educational, ethical, and physical development all with one activity. That is sweet.

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.