The Steem blockchain is a great place to share quality video content like current news or personal blogs. On Utopian.io, the videos shared are usually tutorials — the topic of this post. How can your video content reach more people and be relevant to them? And how can others contribute to the growth of your audience without advertising?
One of the challenges video content producers on the blockchain and beyond it face with is the growing competition for the attention of viewers. It’s not only about creating awesome video content and promoting it but also about expanding the potential audience of the content by adding accessibility layers to existing videos. Such layers can consist of localized and translated content, as well as visual aids and subtitles for the hearing disabled.
Creating such layers as part of the video production process can be extremely difficult and often impossible as they require translators and editors to proof the content localized. That’s where Amara comes in.
Amara.org is, in short, a web-based project with the goal of making all online media content accessible to everyone through community contributions.
Amara is a continuously developed project with far-reaching plans for the future. Built on voluntary work by people all over the world, Amara is showing great promise, as is evident by its worldwide impact. It doesn’t only allow people to work on transcriptions and translations at their pace and convenience, but it also creates opportunities for users to become part of a community with shared interests.
Several well-known projects use Amara services to add a layer of accessibility to their own content. These projects form volunteer groups where one may apply to become a member.
Among these projects, you can find familiar names like TED, GitHub, Udacity and Mozilla. They all support and coordinate the voluntary work, as well as oversee the quality of the content submitted, ensuring it is of sufficient accuracy and value to enhance the project.
The biggest portion of all translated and transcribed content in Amara belongs to English. Amara is a great tool that gives an opportunity to share content that was not understandable to some people before.
Also, it makes it easier for deaf people as they can enjoy entertaining videos similarly as people who can listen to them.
Amara and Utopian
Great, but what is it all for? Utopian.io had come with an incentivizing idea of remunerating different kinds of contributions. In this post, we concentrate on content producers and tutors who share their knowledge with the community and beyond. For doing so, the reward is delivered to them. Currently, the only supported language is plain English, consequently, all contributors are expected to write and speak it. Supporting one language gives us higher chances to avoid seeing duplicate content, although each post would be different in many aspects. But don't leave yet.
We don't need to stop with Utopian, we can see many people within the community who can join the rewarding system and increase the potential reward of the contributor. The content is a result of one individual, but we can make it a content made by a group of enthusiasts who share the same interests. Utopian’s interest is to support the open source idea and quality content.
Let’s take a look at this new attempt toward rewarding more people for their commitment. A recent announcement included the creation of a new account @utopian.edu which is dedicated to providing educational materials for the Utopian community. The first video is perfect for this topic — the video tutorials and the importance of achieving the highest level of content quality. It is supplementary to the well-shaped category of video tutorials.
Well, what is my part in it? I decided to contribute with the subtitles for the video made by @buckydurddle who has been very thorough in preparations and recordings. I asked him to provide the transcript so that I could make the timing as it was my intention to replace the machine-created captions provided by YouTube and share my local version of it. You can find it on Amara where you can also watch the whole video.
Note: Amara supports video embedding, but Steemit and other Steem frontends support only few video services from which we can embed videos. Moreover, a script needs to be included to make it work. In other instances, we are left with regular links.
Amara video support
Working with a particular video is really easy, all you need is to the link. The downside of this service is that you can't upload your video file there, therefore you need to host it first somewhere else. On the other hand, that is not a problem for us if we consider that Utopian allows submitting videos on YouTube or DTube.
The steps are simple in case you want to enter a YouTube link. Insert the link in the appropriate field at amara.org and you will be redirected to the site where you can create the subtitles.
In case of DTube, more steps are required to fulfil our mission. But don't worry, we will get there as well. DTube uses IPFS to save the files and serves it to the viewers. If you tried to copy the ipfs link and paste it into Amara, you would be informed that you provided an unsupported link even though we know that it is the correct link to the video file. So, how do we solve that?
You will need to download the video with ipfs, wrap it with a directory hash and push it back to ipfs. That will preserve the file name with the needed extension. I won't go into details here since there are only a few videos related to Utopian intention at the moment. I can say that it works as long as the video is mp4 and the extension is present within the link.
You can use DLive videos links too. Don't forget that you need the direct link to the file and the extension must be present. Otherwise, it may not be recognized.
Although Amara built its own subtitle editor, which is very straightforward to use even for newcomers, they don't force you to create subtitles with it. If you thought about starting with subtitling, you can use any editor and then upload the complete version. They provide a list of alternatives in their blog.
Conclusion
Creating subtitles is not that easy task as it may appear. When one start working on them, they realize how much we are able to say in few minutes. On the other hand, the hard work that thousands of people are willing to do to share the content and make it accessible to others is enormous and praiseworthy.
Subtitling a video is actually not that obvious task. When you start working with subtitles, you will realize the number of words a person is able to say in few minutes. On the other hand, the hard work that thousands of people are willing to do is enormous and praiseworthy.
Try it for yourself and share your work with the community. They will reward you for certain. Joining a significant project outside Utopian may give you worthy contacts and experience. Remember, content like the one from @utopian.edu can benefit from the assistance of more people. You can follow the video-tutorials tag to find content that you enjoy. Look around, there are some excellent creators in Utopian. Few names can be mentioned to give you a hint for the start. Those are @tensor with his series of Flutter tutorials, @rosatravels talking about Calibre e-book manager, or @buckydurddle and his series about VCV Rack.
Thank you for reading,
espoem
Images were created by @andrejcibik.