Instructional Videos

Add Narration and Closed Captions (CC) to Videos

To reduce cognitive overload and make your videos more accessible, it’s important to add narration and closed captions (cc) to your videos.

How to Add Narration:

Prepare stage:

Have script already

Before you starting recording the narration, or we can say even before you start shooting/making your videos, you need to have script already.

With a script, it will be much easier and more accurate for narrators to do the narration. Also your editing process will be much easier with less eh.. And blank thinking space.

Laptop or computer

Softwares

To add narration, you have multiple choices.

E.g.:

If you want to add narration to a shooting (in person/real) video, you need to have Audacity.

If you want to add narration to a video production tool, like Powtoon. You can record your narration directly to Powtoon.

Well, attention: you can not edit your narration in Powtoon.

Equipments

To make the narration more professional, I would suggest you using microphones.

The equipments that I use are:

Snowball USB Microphone and Portable Sound Cube.

Portable Sound Cube is an optional choice, it’s a soundproof cube which you can place your microphone in it to reduce room tone when recording.

You can either buy them on Amazon or rent them from your organizations’ Digital Media Lab.

For UMass: Digital Media Lab

A quiet room

The smaller the space is, less room tone is. The best choice is a closet or restroom….. Well, sounds weird… but it’s true.

Or you can do the recording in a smaller conference room.

Anyway, choose a place which has less noise and people.

A narrator

Obvious, you need a narrator to do the recording.

Do you need to be the one? Not really.

For me, I don’t do it. Because I’m an English second language speaker, I don’t want people who watch the video pay more attention to my accent than to what I said, what information I want to convey.

So choose a person who has a good voice with less accent.

I mean, accent can be cute, but for more professional… you got what I mean?

The best narrator is reading the script in a conversational style, not too fast, not too slow, and have obvious emotional tone change.

Recording Stage:

Let’s record.

Step 1: Connect your USB microphone to your laptop/computer.

Step 2: Open Audacity.

Is starting recording.

Is pause.

Is stop recording.

If you want to delete your recording or part of your recording.

Just choose the recording or the part, click on delete/Backspace on your keyboard.

Listen back once you finish recording, if it’s all good, click on File, choose Export, ACCG in File Type.

(File Type depends on which tool you want to import the audio in, if it’s Powtoon, then the File Type is ACCG.

Attention: The narrator’s talking speed cannot be too slow, because the effective educational video time limit is maximum 6 minutes. I usually like to limit my videos into 3 minutes. If the talking speed is too slow, it may lengthen the video time.

Editing Stage:

Usually the instructional videos that I made are either Powtoon animation video or shooting videos which I will edit in Adobe Premiere.

Here I will use Powtoon as an example to talk about how to add narrations in your instructional video:

Step 1: Open the video project you want to add narration in Powtoon.

Step 2: Click on right below the video. A panel will appear:

You have two choice here:

Add recorded narration. Or record narration here.

Again, if you choose the latter, you cannot edit your narration in Powtoon.

A solution for that is Add voiceover on CURRENT SLIDE. Record your narration slide by slide.

For ENTIRE POWTOON, you can either choose Add voiceover or Add music, or choose them both.

You can play them at the same time, but again, it’s for entire Powtoon project, you cannot edit on each slide.

How to Add Closed Captions (CC):

Once the narration is done, you’re able to add closed captions to your videos. Because cc needs to match the speed of narration, to reduce cognitive overload.

Types of Captions:

Closed Captioning: on/off, include other auditory
Open Captioning: No on/off, include other auditory
Subtitiles: on/off, without other auditory

Principles of Closed Captions:

Accurate
Synchronous
Complete
Properly placed

Notes:

Don’t go all caps.
Introduce a new speaker: >>Kate:......
If there is more one speaker, use different color or dash - to distinguish speakers.
If there is no visual of speaker, show speaker’s name every time. Otherwise, you don’t need to show the name every time.
Describe a sound/other auditory: [ ]
Caption on a screen: 1-3 lines, no more than 32 characters each line (including ,. And blank space).

Tools for Closed Captions:

Youtube
CADET: only for video shorter than 3 minutes.
Facebook
Clips: for ios/short video only

The tool that I usually use is Youtube.

To use Youtube to create cc, you need to have a youtube account first.

Then you are able to upload the video and add cc to it.

Step 1: Click on the icon below to upload the video to your Youtube channel.

Step 2: Once the video is uploaded, make it Public.

I know some videos maybe for limited access use for some training/lessons. But if you want to use the youtube video in Learning Management System like Moodle or Interactive Learning Tool like Playposit, you cannot make the video personal.

Step 3: Click on Advanced setting when you edit the video details in Youtube.

Step 4: Scroll down to Subtitles and CC area. Unfold the English by Youtube (automatic), click on Edit on Classic Studio.

This is a big reason why we choose Youtube to add CC. Because Youtube can automatically add CC to your video, as long as your video has a narration. That’s also why we want to find a narrator who can speak clearly and fluently.

Step 5: Edit the Closed Captions then click on Publish edits. You can edit your closed caption any time.