ASL captions on Videos

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
April 15, 2007

On Apr 15, 2007, at 12:14 PM, Adam Frost wrote:
> I would love to do that. :-) I have to admit that the caption  
> editing was very easy. The only problem that I had with this whole  
> thing (and you touched on it a while ago) is that the SW as of  
> right now can't be very small and clear at the same time. With the  
> video viewing screen on the computer being so small, I could only  
> fit about two signs per frame which meant that each frame went by  
> really fast. If there was a way to make it so that the signs could  
> be smaller, but not lose readability, then more signs could stay on  
> the screen longer much like English captions.

Yes.. all of these issues, James and I had discussed before and there  
were three things holding us back...money, time and skill in ASL.

With your ASL and computer skills, that will really help!

Plus, regarding the techniques of captioning, James does English  
captioning for others, and is skilled at doing two-language captions  
for the hearing world...I have seen some of his work with captioning  
a media presentation in both English and Spanish captions on a CD,  
where the person clicked on a button and could switch to the other  
language easily...the captions changed from English to Spanish to  
English with the push of a button...very smooth...and he programmed  
that with fancy software on the Mac called FinalCutPro, which we may  
possibly have to purchase to do a professional job...but that is  
exactly why we are a good team...because we all come from different  
professions but can help make the project work...and then Harkle.com  
can become the place on the web where we create a library of ASL  
captioned media...so it will all connect...

Regarding the small size SignWriting...I know the 50% reduction of  
SignWriting symbols available right now is not perfect, but that can  
be fixed. I believe you showed me your new web page that was gorgeous  
that you had used a vector program to fix the smaller symbols? Want  
to tell us about that? And show us how it looks on your web  
page?...what is the link and how did you do it?

Your technique might be applied to the ASL captioning...

Val ;-)