Big advances are taking place in intersection of video with AI (Artificial Intelligence). I ran across an interesting article in Streaming Media Magazine called The State of Video and AI 2018 that takes stock of some of these changes and I wanted to share it with you as we look toward what’s ahead for Duke.
X-Title Importer is a simple tool for subtitle import into FCP X. It is a free tool which allows an easy import of WebVTT, SRT subtitle files, YouTube SBV, Spruce STL chapterlists and FCP X chapters as individual subtitles into Apple's Final Cut Pro X. X-Title Importer (XTI) probably is the most advanced and most affordable tool for subtitle import into FCP X.
We’ve been following trends in this area from a number of directions, including video captioning. As many of you are aware, the needs for captioning videos we produce at Duke are increasing, but the costs of captioning services, most of which rely on intensive manual labor, are high. However, new tools like IBM’s Watson, which includes more than 60 AI services, including machine captioning (with accuracy advertised as a whopping 96%), seem poised to shift the balance and make it possible for us to caption videos on a wider scale. We demoed Watson recently and will continue to monitor it as well as other tools in this space.
In this context I also wanted to point out that we recently began offering ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) for Panopto, Duke’s lecture capture service. We are excited about the opportunities this new functionality will offer students and other viewers who are looking to drill down to points in videos where specific terms are found. This feature adds to Panopto’s already healthy set of features built around in-video search, including OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for slide content, and user-created time-stamped notes and bookmarks.
Xti X-title Importer Software
For anyone looking to add subtitles or captions onto a video in Final Cut, X-Title Importer by Spherico makes pretty short work of the job.
To start, you’ll need a supported source format for your captions. We used a .SRT file, but XTI supports over a dozen formats including Web VTT, Spruce STL and YouTube SBV.
Xti X-title Importers
You’ll also want a template for your subtitles. X-TI includes a basic template, TextUp, which you can modify within the application. For captions with a dynamic background, like a box whose width changes depending on the width of the text, you’ll need to go a little further. Installing one of Spherico’s other applications, TitleExchange, will add a TextUp Box template that can achieve the effect. Additionally, one could create their own by modifying FCPX’s own Basic Title in Motion with a couple clone layers.
Xti X-title Importer List
Once you have your template settled, its a simple matter of selecting your source file within the application and converting it to a .fcpxml file. Open that .fcpxml file with Final Cut and it will create a new project within the library of your choice. The project will include all of your captions added as titles, below which you can simply include your original video.