Captioning Videos in Panopto
Panopto is our video streaming and lecture capture software that allows you to record audio, video, and your computer screen to create videos. It also has an auto-caption feature (Automatic Speech Recognition, or ASR) that may help with creating captions for videos. It may not be the perfect tool for every captioning job, but this feature allows many users to caption their videos with ease.
Enable Auto-Captions for a Video
Panopto has a robust support site with up-to-date documentation. Follow the instructions from the link below to set up auto-captions in Panopto.
How to Add ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) Captions into a Video
Enable Auto-Captions for a Folder
You can set up your entire Panopto course folder to create auto-captions by default. If enabled, this will automatically caption any new recordings that are added to the folder. It will not retroactively request captions for videos already in that folder.
- Browse to the folder you wish to set up automatic captions for.
- In the top right-hand corner, click on More actions (three vertical dots), then Settings (gear icon).
- Click the Settings tab.
- Under Captions and Audio Descriptions, select Automatic Machine Captions from the dropdown menu.
Sessions (videos) that are automatically captioned due to this setting will always send full raw streams rather than edited sessions.
Please note: You will need to repeat this process to enable automatic captions for each subfolder.
Accuracy
Panopto’s first pass at auto-captioning is not 100% accurate, especially for disciplines with specialized jargon (such as STEM), so you should proofread the auto-captions and edit them as needed. If the editing job is very large (because the video is extremely long and/or the automatically produced captions are extremely inaccurate), auto-captions might not be the right choice. If that’s the case, contact support@swarthmore.edu so we can discuss options with you.