Nice Transcript Highlighting Effect on Lynda.com

I usually skip right over the transcripts section of Lynda.com tutorials, so this may have been part of their updated interface for a long time before I actually noticed it. Essentially, it appears they use some sort of timestamping on the video file along with a corresponding tagging of the transcript text in the body of the page to cause snippets of text to hightlight in time with the audio in the video (animated gif below).

It’s nicer than many of the on-screen or hardcoded subtitles I’ve seen in other videos. Of course, my first thought was… I should use this effect to create a bouncing-ball “sing-along” feature for music and song videos.