In this video we will walk you through setting up your first project in Closed Caption Creator. Before you begin, you will want to visit our website and download the appropriate desktop version of Closed Caption Creator for your operating system. Closed Caption Creator is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You may also want to download a copy of the sample content used in this course. Links to the sample content are available in the video description below.

When you first open Closed Caption Creator you will see the “What’s New” window. You can choose to hide this window on startup, and click the Close button. Next, you will see the Welcome screen. Here you can create a new project, open an existing project, import a team project, and manage your account.
Let’s start by Creating a new Project. Enter a Project Name, and import your media. When selecting media, you will need to first choose a media source. Media can be imported from your local hard drive, YouTube, Vimeo, or a cloud bucket such as S3.

We recommend storing your media locally on your computer or network drive. This allows Closed Caption Creator to access the media directly without having to stream it. One thing to keep in mind is that Closed Caption Creator only supports web proxy formats such as MP4, Wav, or Mp3 files. Click the Create Project button when you are ready.

Closed Caption Creator will begin by scanning the media, and alerting you if there is a discrepancy between the default project frame rate, and the frame rate of the file. Click Yes to update the project frame rate.

Now that we’ve created our first project, let’s quickly review the Closed Caption Creator UI. On the left hand side of the screen we have the media player. Below the media player we have the QuickTools panel. On the right hand side we have the Event Editor. Inside the Event List Editor, we have the Event Group navbar, and Event List. At the bottom of the screen we have the Timeline which can be toggled on and off using the timeline toggle in the top right hand side of the screen. Next to the Timeline Toggle we have the select option for Light and Dark modes.

Let’s start by playing back our video. Click the Play button in the transport controls underneath the media player. When you click the Play button for the first time, Closed Caption Creator will be able to read the media’s duration, and start to generate the audio waveform in the timeline.

Next, let’s create our first Audio Description Event Group. By default, Closed Caption Creator will create a Subtitle Event Group along with a project. In order to create a new Event Group you can go to file - new - Event Group. Or click the first tab in the Event Group Navbar near the top of the Event Editor.

In the Group Type dropdown, select Audio Description. In the Display name, enter a name that is easily recognizable. I’ll make mine AD English. We’ll disable realtime Error Detection for this project by setting the reading rate, and subtitle requirements to 9999. We’ll also set the minimum event duration to 0 and turn off Overlap detection, and illegal character detection. These settings are only important when creating subtitles and closed captioning.

Click Create Group.

You should notice a new Event Group appear in the Event Group Navbar. Let’s remove the first Event Group since we won’t be needing it. To remove an Event Group, open the Event Group options menu by clicking the vertical ellipses icon to the right of the tab. Select Delete from the list of options.

The last step we’ll take when setting up our project is to create a new Styles preset. I recommend entering sample text in the textarea of the first event. Next, go over to the Styles tab in the QuickTools panel and switch to Subtitle mode by clicking the Caption Mode toggle so that it is off. In Subtitle mode, you have control over the font, font size, and colour properties. Choose a font, and font size that is appropriate for you. When you are done, you can choose to save your settings as a new Styles Preset. Click the Save option, and provide a preset name.

Congratulations on setting up your first audio description project in Closed Caption Creator. In the next video, we’ll learn how to manage our projects using the Storage Explorer and local storage options.