How to Generate Captions via Scripting in Microsoft Expression Encoder 2

Now Encoder also has a very powerful scripting interface and depending on your comfort level of scripting, there is lots of fun stuff that you can do. In fact the scripting commands menu works a lot like the Markers pane and that the Markers pane is a useful add on for the sake of navigation. You can simply click on markers up here to jump to that point in the timeline which can be a really quick way to add new scripts. For example, if we wanted to add a script at this point in our video, we jump there with the Markers pane, click Add and we get a very similar looking value here on our scripts command palette.

A time indicator tells us where we are. Under value, I want to make a caption so that I have some close captioning that shows up during the course of our video so I will just type the word Caption and then enter what I want the caption to be. Now just like markers, you can export and import script commands so I am going to click on the import button and choose some pre-made captions that I have created, click Open and you will see that they have all nicely been added.

I have a duplicate here on the stamp at flat, so I am going to get rid of that one. So now we have added some close captioning, we have added some thumbnails and it is time to output our file. The earlier preset we made is still there for us to use. Let us pick something with a slightly higher bit rate, so it stands a chance of looking really good and let us go to Web Server Highspeed Broadband and that will be a nice big good looking file.

And if I go to output, down here in our job output pane, I can double check the name which it says it is going to be the original file name with the default extension, that is fine. I can pick a location for it. I can just make sure that that is on our desktops so I could find it easily. And this is all great if our target is a windows media file. But our goal in this walkthrough was to target the Microsoft Silverlight environment so we can create a more flexible stand alone experience.

So note the template popup here, this allows us to choose and even preview a selection of Silverlight skins for our video. I will search the different ones in here, that executive, you have got minimal list. I am going to come down here and choose the one called Expression because it fully supports a lot of the things that we have covered in this video and that should point out that you can actually customize these templates in Expression blend.

For now, we will just choose the Expression template which automatically takes advantage of our markers, our scripts, and we are ready to encode. So we will just click the Encode button and wait for our video to cook. And as before, we get a nice progress bar and if your experience with past versions of Encoder or Windows Media Encoding in general, you will see how nice and quick the new VC1 Codec’s are to render.

Once it is finish, it will open up automatically in your default web browser. It might start to play on its own depending on what you are settings. In this particular skin, we have this nice little popup, fade in, and fade out control panel that we can use to control our video.

You will notice that our captions are appearing at the bottom of the screen just as we expect. Also, if I pause and click on this little arrow up here, you will see the thumbnails that we created which will allow us to immediately and quickly navigate the key portions of our video in a very intuitive fashion. Once again, push Play to continue from that point. And because it is Silverlight we can just double click on the video to play at full screen.