Add captions from a .srt to Camtasia Project as Callouts

Edits the .tscproj file directly to add text from captions as callouts

TL;DR - Hacky script adds captions from a .srt file to a Camtasia project as callouts. It's not perfect, but it's better than adding them manually.

Assuming Python 3.10 or greater is installed, you can run it like this:

python add_caption_callouts.py captions.srt camtasia_prj_dir.tscproj/test_project.tscproj

More Info

It's a hack - normal captions can't easily be moved, animated, etc., but adding them one by one as callouts manually is annoying. This is meant to be a quick way to get them into the project so you can start to edit them / move them / animate them.

I realize the overlap of people who use Camtasia and people who run Python scripts is probably small - if you think you want to use this but don't know how feel free to reach to out and I'll try to help. If there's enough interest I will stand it up behind a Web UI. I'm hesitant to put much work into it because I'm sure they'll add this feature in Camtasia soon.

This is developed with Camtasia 2023, Python 3.10 and Windows, I don't know what will happen on other Camtasia versions.

Usage

This doesn't use any external libraries, so you should be able to just run it with python 3.10 or later. It's a command line script, so you'll need to run it from a terminal. You can run it like this to get help:

python add_captions_as_callouts.py --help

You have to give the script a .tscproj file and a .srt file. The .srt file is the file that contains the captions, see the example. The .tscproj file is the Camtasia project file, which is really just JSON. Make sure you pass the actual file path and not the directory path.

Final usage might look like:

python add_caption_callouts.py captions.srt camtasia_prj_dir.tscproj/test_project.tscproj

The script will add a new track to the project and add a callout for each caption in the .srt file, and then save the project as new file (in case it breaks).

Example

Here's a YouTube Video based on the example data.

Known Issues

When the text is longer than the length of the call out, it looks truncated. It isn't, it's just that the text past the length of the callout is super small. Highlight it all and you can change the size and edit.

Disclaimer

This is a script I made to make my life easier, I'm sharing because I think it might help others out there who have the same somewhat niche problem. I'm not sure it will work all the time, and it's not meant to produce polished captions, just to get them in there in callouts so you can continue to edit them however you want.

I'm running on windows and I haven't tested on other platforms.

Contributions are welcome! Open and issue or PR and I'll take a look.