Studio auto-captioning 'Failed'

[NeilGrant]

I have uploaded several videos to Studio and requested English captions to be auto-generated. They are coming back as 'Failed'. When I try to upload an externally generated .vtt file (generated using Stream) the file won't upload (no error message received).

[SusanNiemeyer]

My understanding is that auto-captioning only works for videos created within Canvas Studio. Unless there's been a change, I don't believe Canvas Studio will create captions for uploaded videos. 

[Chris_Hofer]

@SusanNiemeyer ...

This isn't exactly right.  Captions can be auto-generated for videos that are created directly in Studio as well as any videos someone has created on his/her own offline and then uploaded to his/her Studio library.  The only kinds of videos that cannot use the auto-generated option are those that have been added from YouTube and Vimeo.

• How do I upload a caption file to Canvas Studio media?
• How do I use the Canvas Studio Caption Request Tool to add captions to a media file?
• How do I use the Caption Editor to edit a caption file?

Hope this helps to clarify things.

[SusanNiemeyer]

Thanks, @Chris_Hofer, for your clarification. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, I recorded a number of videos which I uploaded to YouTube. I ended up having to fix the captions in YouTube before I transferred them into Canvas Studio. Editing the captions in YouTube was a huge time killer.  Also, I had wanted to fix the captions of YouTube videos created by other people, but realized that this endeavor was impossible as well. 

Since then, I've created more videos directly in Canvas Studio to avoid the captioning issues I had experienced earlier.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @NeilGrant ...

When you say "generated using Stream", what do you mean?  When you open up your *.vtt file (you could open this in Word or even Notepad if you are using Windows), what does your file look like?  Does it look like the examples on this page?

Web Video Text Tracks Format (WebVTT) - Web APIs | MDN (mozilla.org)

00:01.000 --> 00:04.000
Your captions here.

00:05.000 --> 00:09.000
Here are more captions.
And these captions are shown on a second line within the same time frame.

Hope to hear back from you soon!

(Side note...I have moved this topic over to the Canvas Studio group here in the Community to keep questions related to Studio together in one area.)

[NeilGrant]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the reply.

I used Microsoft Stream to generate a .vtt file. It does have some junk in front of each time stamp so I might delete that out and try again.

WEBVTT

c634fb1c-feea-43e2-96ed-05dc821b0431-0
00:00:02.630 --> 00:00:06.625
I'm going to talk in this brief
video about the Aboriginal and

c634fb1c-feea-43e2-96ed-05dc821b0431-1
00:00:06.625 --> 00:00:10.494
Torres Strait Islander child
placement principle, which is a

c634fb1c-feea-43e2-96ed-05dc821b0431-2
00:00:10.494 --> 00:00:14.236
really significant piece of
policy in the space of working

[Chris_Hofer]

@NeilGrant ...

Yeah...those strings of alpha-numeric characters at the top of each segment are most likely the issue.  Get rid of those, and try re-uploading the *.vtt file.  Also, I am not sure if you can have two times that overlap or not...  For example, in your first caption, you have 00:00:06.625 as the end time.  Then, you have that same time stamp for the beginning of the next caption.  You could certainly try it with a small file first to see if it works...and if it doesn't, you know you'll have to adjust your time stamps slightly to 00:00:06.626 ... or something like that.  Good luck with things!