Digital Communications
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Videos

Video Formats

All videos provided to University Communications for inclusion in the University’s YouTube channel must meet the following guidelines:

Container
MPEG4 (MP4) or Matroska (MKV)
Video Codec
h.264
Video Resolution
1920×1080 Progressive or 1280×720 Progressive
Video Framerate
29.97, 30, 59.94, or 60 frames per second
Audio Codec
AAC
Audio Sample Rate
44.1 kHz or 48 kHz
Audio Channels
Mono or Stereo (no surround sound)

Since YouTube will re-compress your video we do not have a specific recommendation for bitrate, but video and audio should be compressed at a high enough bitrate to ensure a clear picture and low-distortion audio.

Video Accessibility

In order to ensure that our videos are accessible for visitors with hearing disabilities, videos must include closed captions. Closed captions must:

  1. Include the speaker’s words verbatim. You should even include filler words, like “um” and “uh.”
  2. Indicate the person speaking if the person is not on screen. When there are multiple speakers in a video and the speakers are off-screen, indicate which person is speaking whenever the speaker changes (not for every line of dialogue).
  3. Indicate other sounds. While this is at your own discretion, any important sound (i.e. sound that is not raw noise) should be indicated in captions with brackets (e.g. [door slams] [engine starts]). If your video starts with some music before any dialogue, you should indicate that with [music playing] so that hearing-impaired viewers know that their captions are displaying properly.
  4. Be synchronized with the video. Providing a transcript may be helpful to people who don’t enjoy watching content in video format, but it is not enough to meet accessibility requirements. Captions must display in time with the video.

Providing Captions

When you provide a video to University Communications to post on the University’s main YouTube channel you can provide captions in one of three ways.

  1. Provide a transcript. YouTube will attempt to synchronize the transcript to the video through voice recognition. University Communications will check the synchronization and ensure that non-speech sounds are also represented.
  2. Provide a subtitle file. YouTube supports several subtitle file formats.
  3. Arrange for professional captioning. Professional captioning usually takes at minimum two full business days, so plan accordingly.

Posting Videos

For the purposes of ensuring the widest platform support and uptime, videos posted should be hosted on YouTube. We also have provided support for Vimeo.  Videos posted must have Closed Captions for any dialogue in the video. Whenever possible, provide the same content as text and static images, as it’ll allow for more people to access the content.

To place a video on the page, press enter or return to start a new line, paste the URL to the video, and WordPress will take care of the rest. Like images, our layout will automatically size videos to fill the space in which you place them – but unlike images, we assume that all videos are 16:9 aspect ratio.