Creating Closed Captions with MAGpie

MAGpie is a free, open-source closed-captioning software created and maintained by the National Center for Accessible Media. It is not extraordinarily powerful, nor reliable. But it is free and open-source and works most of the time (with software, you can only pick two.) You can download it here.

Unfortunately, MAGpie’s documentation is woefully underwhelming (again – free and open source). However, its workflow, once you get used to it, is easy and simple to understand.

MAGpie is a nifty program – it’s half media player, half word processor. A MAGpie project consists of tracks – sequences of individual captions, with their in-times (the time they start displaying on the screen) and out-times (the times they stop). MAGpie is designed so that each track contains captions for the same video in different languages. You can even copy the exact timecodes from one track to another, if your translations are word-for-word.

The idea of captioning using MAGpie is to play through the video and, using the keyboard shortcuts, time each line to the video as it comes up. Of course, you can also go in and edit the timings manually down to the hundredth of a second. It really depends on how accurate you want the captions to be. The method I use for most videos is the following: one pass of initial timing, followed by one pass of watching the captions and adjusting the ones that are most obviously off. It’s not perfect, but with a little practice, you can get them pretty dead-on your first run through, and only have to do a little correction later. If you really want to, you can go in and get the timing of each caption right down to the hundredth of a second. Do not do this. You will drive yourself insane.

Creating a MAGpie Project

You’ll need two things to caption a video with MAGpie – the video file itself (MAGpie uses Quicktime for video, so it’ll support pretty much any format that Quicktime supports) and a transcript of the video. The transcript’s not essential, but you will at some point need to write down all of your captions. I find it easier to transcribe the video first and break it up into captions, then worry about timing them.

So let’s go ahead and walk through creating a project. Go ahead and fire up MAGpie, and go to File -> New Project.

Base Media is the video I mentioned earlier, the one you’ll be captioning. You’ll also need to enter the dimensions of the video, since MAGpie won’t detect them itself (free, open source). You might be able to find it out by right-clicking on the video file, clicking Properties, and checking the Details tab. If the dimensions aren’t there, don’t worry too much – it’s not vital. The only thing that will happen is MAGpie will distort the video to match the dimensions you put in.

You may also have noticed MAGpie has a lot of formatting options for the text. This may or may not matter to you depending on what format you’re exporting your finished captions to. The KZO Player doesn’t particularly care about the formatting of your text, so we’re gonna skip all that for now.

Once you’ve successfully created your project, you’ll see the main MAGpie screen with an empty track and the video player off to the side.

This is where the transcript of the video is going to come in handy. Now we can fill in the lines for the captions. You want to try and hit the sweet spot with this; if the lines are too long, they won’t fit on the screen. If they’re too short, they’ll be changing so fast they’re distracting. A good way to break up sentences is to break them up according to natural pauses in speech. Use your best judgement – you’ll get a feel for it.

MAGpie’s workflow is based around knowing the keyboard shortcuts. Here are some that you’ll find useful:

Shift+Enter: While editing a track, you can switch between editing mode and selection mode, allowing you to move around between individual cells.

While editing a caption, double-tap Enter to jump to a new row.

Timing the Captions

Now it’s time to sync up our captions with the video. It’s important to know the keyboard shortcuts for this process to work. Here are the ones you’ll need to know:

F6: Play/pause the video:

F9: Set caption start time to current video time.

F10: Set caption end time to current video time.

This might seem a little confusing at first. That’s because it is confusing. Don’t get discouraged! We’ll walk through the process from beginning to end.

The idea is this: start with the top caption selected (press Shift+Enter to switch to and from selection mode). Press F6 to start the video playing. When your speaker starts talking, press F9 – this is when your selected caption will START playing. Notice the selector automatically moves down to the next caption. If there’s a pause in speech, press F10 and the caption’s END time will be set to the current time in the video – meaning it’ll disappear.

You can set these times however you like. I don’t like to set end times unless there’s a significant pause in the video where no-one is talking; everyone has a natural pace to their speech, and if I try to set end times for every little pause, I end up spending too much time just trying to get them right. However, you should go with what works for you.

Once you’ve entered some captions, you can go back and review them in the video to make sure you’ve gotten the timing right.

Exporting Captions

MAGpie will export your captions to a couple different formats. You can see the export options by clicking the Export menu.

Here at KZO, we use a slight variation of the Adobe Flash DFXP format. However, what format you’re using will depend on your target platform. MAGpie will export your closed captions as a file in the same directory as your source video.