Adding Closed Captions with Windows Live Movie Maker

If you don't have litigation support sofware like InData's Time Coder to synch transcript text with videos, you can add closed captions in a pinch with Windows Live Move Maker. After you open a video file in this program (pre-installed with Windows 7) you'll see the option on the home tab for captions. Before starting to add in caption text make sure that there are segments displayed in the pane to the right for every second or so of video. If that is not the case, click in the area and press the plus key until the segments are broken down second by second. It may seem fast, but you'll want to enter about a phrase of captioned text for each second. Also before beginning to enter the text you want to prime the video with segments of draft captions. The default duration of a caption in WLMM is 7 seconds. This is far too long for closed captions. The software doesn't allow you to reset the the default duration, and redoing the duration of each caption gets time consuming. Instead create one draft caption of about 1 second or a little more and copy and paste it several times. (See Fig. 1) Then select all of the captions holding down the CTRL key and copy them so you can paste multiple draft 1 second captions throughout the video. (See figures 2 & 3 below). Now you'll be ready to move along with statements in a deposition and add in the witness and attorneys statements as they are spoken. See the below video clip with closed captions that I created using this method.