среда, 10 июля 2013 г.

Creating .lrc lyrics using just MovieMaker and Notepad for YouTube

Hi! Today's tutorial is about simple way to create song lyrics file in LRC format, that can be used as +YouTube  captions. You will need only Microsoft MovieMaker and Notepad.
LRC is simple, yet powerful format of lyrics. If you want, read about it on Wikipedia, but I'll describe it here, as it simple like this:
[00:07.00]First line of lyrics<00:08.90>
[00:09.00]Second line, and so on...<00:11.00>

Where time in square brackets is start of line and time in pointy brackets - end time of line. Time format is like this: mm:ss.xx where mm is minutes, ss is seconds and xx is hundredths of a second. (triangle brackets are used in extended format of LRC, but it seems that YouTube understands it.)

Okay, all you need is to create a file named, for example, songlyrics.lrc whith lines as above. First, open "Notepad" or any other text editor, that can save .txt files, then type in lyrics line by line, or, even better, search for in somewhere in the Internet and copy-paste to editor. Delete all empty lines and any other text that is not lyrics. Copy all chorus parts to the places they must be, if there are lines with "chorus" text instead of chorus lines. Now you need to enter timings. How to get them? That's when MovieMaker is helpful. Start it, and if your song is an MP3 file, press "Add movies / images" button, select any image you have, and change it's duration to at least the length of the song. Enter 600 seconds for 10 minutes, for example. Why we need an image? 'Cause MovieMaker won't load an .mp3 file without an image or video. Now press "Add music" and select your MP3 file. (Now, by the way, you know how to make a music video with still image!) If your song is a video, add that video here instead of image and MP3.

Okay, now we ready to write timings. Press SpaceBar while in MovieMaker and the video (or audio) will start to play. When you hear beginning of first word of a song, and even better, when you feel that first word will sound in the next moment, press SpaceBar again to pause the song. On the right under the video's window you'll see the timing you need (first one, before the slash /). But there is comma (,) instead of period (.), mind that. You cannot just copy/paste timings from MovieMaker, so you'll need to type it from keyboard. If first word of the line already sounded, move slider back a little and press SpaceBar again and then again to pause playback BEFORE the word is played. This is important for your lyrics to appear not after the words are already sung. Okay, write the numbers in square brackets before first line of text, like in example above. Then press Spacebar and listen to the moment when the line ends, pause and write timing in pointy brackets after the line. It is better to rearrange windows so that you will see timings in MovieMaker when editing in Notepad. All you need now is to proceed to the end of the song writing all start and end timings of all lines. Oh well.

To simplify the process, type or copy-paste this: [00:00.00] in front of all lines and this <00:00.00> in the end of all lines, and then you'll need to change zeros to the numbers MovieMaker shows you.
That's it! Save file from Notepad. You can try to change the extention of the file to .lrc, but YouTube doesn't mind if it is left as .txt

Now you can go to YouTube's video manager and click "Captions" in drop-down menu to the right of the video. Then press "Add captions", choose your language and press "Upload timed caption file" button to select you new shiny lyrics!

I made 3 variants (different languages) of lyrics for one of my videos this way, check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5hWZVOx-aM (If text doesn't show up, swich on captions by clicking on "captions" icon under the video, then selecting a language)

Thanks for reading this, feel free to comment.

Комментариев нет:

Отправить комментарий