TubeCaption is growing!

We did it.  We launched the first Beta version of TubeCaption on Monday.  We are proud to be the first free, community-driven captioning service.  Since the site is still under heavy development, we have not made any public announcements yet.  We are working really hard to smooth out the rough edges and make TubeCaption even more awesome.

Most people whom we demoed the site to really like the look and feel of the site.  However, the central piece of TubeCaption is Captionizer, our timeline-based captioning editor.  I personally have spent hundreds of hours into developing the editor and the interface so that we can streamline the captioning process.  As helpful as the captions can be to a video, the captioning process is tedious.  Even worse, the current tools out there on the internet are out-right impossible to do anything significant.

I am spending as much time working in the editor as I do to develop it.  I want to feel the pains of someone who dedicates the time to write captions for the clips.  I want to find ways to help ease these pains and make the editor even easier to use.  Currently, the editor is being optimized and tuned for keyboard shortcut.  Most important features such as inserting, editing can be accessed via keyboard shortcuts. After working on a few full-length video clips, I realize that it is not about the software, but about the user and how the tool can be tweaked to keep the user the most productive.

Tonight, I just added 2 new features which will make editing captions a whole lot easier:  play from User Cursor (shortcut: Ctrl + Space) and “enter edit mode for last active caption” (shortcut:  L).  I will go into details about the different shortcuts that Captionizer supports in a later post, so stay tuned.

I also moved the database to its own dedicated machine to prepare better for future growth. I will keep monitoring the main web server and tune it as much as possible.  My goal is to keep page response of TubeCaption to be less than 300ms. 

We have lots of plan in the next coming weeks so both Javier and I are pretty excited.   In the mean time, why don’t you register for an account, fire up the captionizer and start captioning?