Video Digests

Video Digests Creation Tutorial

Overview

Creating a video digest consists of the following steps:
  1. Uploading a video from YouTube
  2. Adding a transcript
  3. Using the transcript and video to create a video digests
  4. Saving, publishing, and sharing the video digest

This tutorial walks you through these steps. This is research-grade software and you are likely to run into bugs! Please contact us with any questions and for support.

Upload A Video

Starting from the video digest creation start page, copy and paste a YouTube url of the video that you will make into a video digest.

Add a Transcript

On the next page, you will choose a transcript. You have three options:

  • Use YouTube's autogenerated transcript. This gives you word-level alignment, but no punctuation. It can vary from "pretty good!" to "wildly inaccurate!"
  • Use a transcript that was manually uploaded to YouTube. These can be extremely accurate, but sometimes creators upload captions that are even worse than the autogenerated data.
  • Provide your own SRT or VTT captions file. You can create one automatically with Descript (see this how-to), or manually with VTT Creator.

Create the Video Digest

After successfully uploading a video and transcript, you can start creating the video digest via our editing interface: The "Editing Instructions" pane in the bottom right lists the actions that you can perform. Here's an example of a few common actions:

Segment the video into chapter elements

You can create a new chapter element by clicking on the transcript while holding the ctrl+alt (cmd+alt on a mac) keys:

Segment the video into section elements

You can create new section elements by clicking on the transcript while holding the ctrl (cmd on a mac) key:

Edit text elements

You can edit the text elements by clicking on them and changing the text:

Write section summaries

You can write section summaries by clicking on the section boxes and typing a summary into them:

Select keyframes

You can change the keyframe elements by navigating the video to the desired location and clicking the camera icon:

Preview / Save / Publish / Share the Video Digest

You can use the toolbox in the bottom right corner to preview, save, and publish the final video digest,

Inspired by Bret Victor's presentation Media for Thinking the Unthinkable, members of the VisLab at U.C. Berkeley built a set of authoring tools to construct this presentation.

You can read about their work in their UIST 2014 publication, and you can view more video digests at videodigests.com.