by Kevin Siegel 
Closed captioning (CC) allows you to provide descriptive information in your published eLearning project that typically matches the voiceover audio contained in your Camtasia project.
There are a couple of ways you can add closed captions to your project. During this post I'm going to show you how you can add the captions manually (by typing or copying/pasting from an existing script), and how to have Camtasia transcribe the voiceover audio using the Speech-to-text feature.
In the image below I've opened a project that already has audio on the Timeline.
To add closed captions, select the Captions tool. (Closed captions aren't the same as Callouts.)
If you'd like to listen to the audio and transcribe what you hear, click the Add caption media button.
You can then press [enter] to listen to the voiceover audio and type what you hear. When finished, press [tab] and [enter] to create another caption.
Personally, I'm not a fan of typing/transcribing. In an ideal world, you would have a voiceover script (perhaps a Word document). In that case, typing and pasting between Camtasia and Word makes the process of adding the captions a painless process. (If you've never created a voiceover script, check out our voiceover script-writing class and learn how.)
If you don't have the voiceover script and you're not a fan of typing, check out Camtasia's Speech-to-text feature. To begin, bring up the Captions panel as if you were going to add the captions manually and then click Speech-to-text.
The Tips for Generating Accurate Speech-to-text Captionsscreen offers some awesome tips on making the process as smooth as possible.
Click the Continue button and Camtasia will scan your project and transcribe the audio for you.
While I found the Speech-to-text feature to be awesome, it was a bit hit or miss. For example, the first caption you see below ("The if the if the left half the") was actually background music. I have no idea why Camtasia attempted to transcribe it, but the results were just a tad off the mark considering there were no lyrics at all. The second caption was a fair attempt, but there were several typos. The third caption was actually quite good.
Getting rid of the unwanted caption is no problem. Simply right-click and choose Delete caption text.
In the images below, you can see the significant edits I needed to make to the second caption. Nevertheless, I found it faster to edit the caption as opposed to typing it manually.
And in the following two images, you can see how little editing was required to get the caption ready to go.
And in the image below you can see how the second caption appears in my produced eLearning lesson as a closed caption.
If you're like to see a video of the process of manually adding closed captions to a Camtasia project, check this out.
***
Looking for Camtasia training? Check out this live, online class.
Comments