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Panopto is our video streaming and lecture capture software that allows you to record audio, video, and your computer screen to create educational videos. It also has an auto-caption feature that may help with creating captions for videos. It may not be the perfect tool for your own captioning job, but this new feature allows a lot of users to be able to caption their own videos with ease.

Panopto’s first pass at auto transcribing captioning is still less than ideal so you should proofread the auto-captions and edit them when needed. If the editing job is very large (because the video is extremely long, and/or the automatically-produced captions are extremely inaccurate), Panopto still might not be the right tool for the job. If that’s the case, be sure to contact Academic Technology so we can discuss different options for you.

This speech-to-text feature will listen to the audio track and automatically produce captions that are synched to the correct time points in your video. You can view these captions and edit them as necessary. For step-by-step instructions on auto-captioning in Panopto, follow the steps below.

  1. Create or upload your video into Panopto as you normally would. The captioning process occurs after the video is uploaded and processed.

  2. In your assigned Panopto folder, click on the Edit button next to the video you want to caption.

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  1. A screenshot of the Panopto application, showing a video file with the ''Edit'' button highlighted. Image Added



  2. On the left-hand side, select the Captions tab, and pull down the Import captions menu. Select Import automatic captions.

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  1. The Panopto captions menu, with the drop down to Import Captions featured. ''Important Automatic Captions'' is the first option, and is the one we recommend.Image Added



  2. You will now see the automatically-generated captions appear along the lefthand side of the screen.

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  1. Another Panopto screenshot, displaying automated captions for a video. There are time stamps to the right of each line of captioning.Image Added



  2. You can edit each caption by clicking inside the text box. These automatically-generated captions will be around 80% accurate, but all users will need to review these captions and edit where necessary. The captions will also lack punctuation and capitalization.

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  1. Here, the user has highlighted a line of caption, and two symbols appear to the right. One is a pencil, to edit the caption. The other is a trashcan, to delete that line.Image Added



  2. If you need to edit the time that a caption appears, click on the pencil icon for that particular caption. A pop-up window will appear where you can alter the timecode.

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  1. The pencil icon from the previous image is highlighted. Selecting it will allow you to alter the timecode for a given caption.Image Added



  2. You may listen and watch your video as you edit the captions, clicking the pause and play buttons as necessary.

  3. When you are finished editing your captions, click the Apply button at the top right-hand corner.

    A final screenshot of Panopto, highlight the green ''Apply'' button in the upper right hand of the editing screen.Image Added

Info

Panopto uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically generate captions. Sometimes the AI engine does not have the necessary vocabulary to accurately convert the spoken words into text. We find this issue most often in courses with specialized jargon (e.

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g. STEM courses).

If you find this to be the case with your video, please reach out to accessibility@swarthmore.edu. We will set you up with an alternate captioner to improve accuracy.