Before cielo24, the team at Atomic Learning spent countless hours transcribing video for captions. The international educational training company spent so much time on transcription that, at times, quality suffered.
With cielo24, the Atomic team slashed transcription times from 40 hours a week to just 20 minutes. As a result, video producers have more time to focus on what matters: content.
The Challenge
Atomic Learning addresses the common challenges found in education today. The company helps educators around the world use the latest pedagogical tools and techniques in the classroom. To do it, they’ve created an extensive video library—thousands of clips about everything from inspiring young minds to personal and professional development. To meet accessibility standards, every one of those videos needs to be captioned.
“We want to ensure that we are producing a product that’s accessible to all learners. Captioning is critical,” says Atomic Learning’s Marketing Communications Manager Kathy Sell. “We have clients with hearing disabilities that wouldn’t be able to attend our workshops or watch our videos without the captioning.”
Before cielo24, the Atomic Learning team did all captioning by hand. “We had someone at a keyboard type out word for word what was being said in the video,” says Jeremy Mikel, publishing manager at Atomic Learning. “I did that for a couple of years and it took quite a bit of self restraint to keep yourself in that chair and type that out.”
The Atomic Learning team had tried several dictation software packages, but accuracy was lacking. The software transcriptions were riddled with errors that had to be corrected after the fact. “It took almost as long to correct the errors as it did to simply transcribe by hand,” says Mikel.
Mikel handled transcription himself, but it took time away from fine-tuning content for Atomic Learning users. “We didn’t have time or resources we wanted to work on making better videos,” he says.
The Solution
Mikel discovered cielo24 while attending an educational conference. The publishing manager was looking for a solution to his transcription woes. “We were evaluating different services for speed, accuracy and cost,” he says. “cielo24 immediately appealed to us because of the ultra-fast turnaround and guaranteed accuracy.”
The Atomic Learning team decided to give cielo24 a try. The process is simple: Upload a video through an easy-to-use web interface, then wait for a notification. Within a few hours (or less), transcription is complete and Mikel can share the captioned video or download an SRT caption file. “Videos are transcribed long before a 48-hour time period,” says Mike.
“And when it’s done it automatically appears on our site. There’s no other switches that we need to flip—it’s all automatic.”
Time spent on transcription went from hours to minutes. “It went from 40 hours a week to maybe 20 minutes,” says Mikel. “It has been a godsend because we have been able to free ourselves up to focus on other priorities that needed to be tackled.”
And accuracy isn’t an issue. “Reports of errors are infrequent and when they do come up it’s something trivial like comma placement or homonym mixups. And then we’re able to go into the cielo24 interface and correct those minor errors quickly and they update live on our site,” says Mikel.
Now Mikel can focus on working with video producers to fine-tune content. “Much of my time has shifted toward QA of videos,” he says. “We’re able to make sure the person developing the movie is staying on target and meeting the learning objectives we set out to meet. I can spend much more time taking a critical eye to quality, not just captioning. We’ve been able to catch more things, steer people in the right direction and produce a higher quality product as a result of taking captioning off our plate.”
“The other thing is that having the closed captioning on is a great way to reinforce language development for ESL students. Not the direct reason we do it, but it is a secondary reason.”
The Issue:
Atomic Learning produces and publishes thousands of videos for clients across the globe. To meet accessibility requirements, all those videos need to be captioned, and accurately. Before cielo24, the team did all captioning by hand. It took hundreds of hours, sapping valuable resources that could be used elsewhere.
The Solution:
Now Atomic Learning has all their videos automatically captioned using cielo24. In just minutes of uploading a video file through the web interface, caption files are ready to go.
The Results:
With cielo24, the Atomic Learning team has slashed captioning time from 40 hours a week to just 20 minutes. Now they can focus on producing better and more educational training materials.
