Sample email to Request Permission to Caption a Video

Request

Dear YouTube Username/Name,

The College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University is developing an online course entitled: PNG 425 – Principles of Well Testing and Evaluation. This course will be delivered through Penn State’s World Campus.

As part of the course materials, the course author and instructor would like to link to/embed the following item(s) which are hosted under your YouTube account:

  • Insert item description here – be as exact as possible (name of video, link to video).

YouTube’s permissions currently allow us to link to/embed the video; however, we noticed that it was not closed-captioned for hearing-impaired users. We would like to request permission to caption this video for you at our expense.  Once we have the video captioned, would you be willing to upload the caption file?

We will wait until we hear from you before proceeding.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Stevie Rocco
Senior Instructional Designer
John A. Dutton Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence
The Pennsylvania State University

stevier@psu.edu

 

Once you have the srt file, send it to the video owner with the following instructions

The srt file is not a video file, it's a file containing captions that can be attached to your existing video. So all you have to do is this:

1. Save the srt file to your computer/desktop

2. Login to your YouTube account

3. Access your name of video video (YouTube link to video)

4. Click the cc button directly below the video screen

5. Click on the bar (directly to the right of the video) that's entitled "Add new subtitles or CC"

6. From the dropdown menu, select "English"

7. Select the "Upload a File" method from the choices given

8. Click on the radio button entitled "Subtitles file"

9. Click the Browse button to search for the srt file that you saved on your desktop in step 1

10. Click on the saved srt file, and then click the "Open" button

11. The location of the file should then appear in a window next to the "Browse" button

12. Click the blue "Upload" button

13. In the next window, click "Publish"

If that doesn't work, go back to step 1 and repeat until you feel like banging your head on your desk in frustration. No....this should work! If it doesn't, I'll need to find someone else to help me understand how to help you. So...give these steps a try and let me know if you run into problems. 

Thank you for your help with this!