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FCPX Captions
I have been using FCPX to QC closed captions created by an outside vendor. I imported the .scc file over the image and I’ve noticed a number of anomalies. This is a 90-minute feature.
In approximately a dozen instances, I have 2-line captions where the bottom line is not visible. The text is there in the inspector, but it simply doesn’t appear on-screen. This is not a consistent problem, because most of the 2-liners are fine. FCPX does not flag any errors with these captions.
The vendor has an online proofing player and these captions appear fine within their tool. Thoughts?
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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15 Replies
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[Oliver Peters] “Thoughts?”
It’s busted.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “It’s busted.”
That’s what I was afraid of. Neither FCPX’s nor Premiere’s captioning feature seems terribly reliable. Good for quick QC checks and some simple captioning, but still not completely ready-for-prime-time, I suppose.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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To be honest, how much have you really looked at captions until now?
The whole system is imperfect and could be better. But it’s also good.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “To be honest, how much have you really looked at captions until now?”
In the past I have worked with captions in the SD world, where info was embedded into the vertical interval. Far easier, since it could be generated and then manipulated as video. Until the caption feature was introduced in Premiere, I had mainly QC’ed finished results for HD captions generated by caption houses. I haven’t used Avid’s implementation. Premiere’s implementation has been very unreliable. FCPX’s looked better at introduction, but in practice is only a little bit better. From what I’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t trust either to deliver captions correctly.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “From what I’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t trust either to deliver captions correctly.”
But ti sounds like the captions are there but FCPX isn’t displaying some of them correctly, but they display elsewhere correctly.
Maybe this is just a little snag in FCPX? Definitely worth reporting to Apple.
Jeremy
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I’d be curious to read your follow-up messages on how you found and fixed this problem.
At a guess, I’d posit that there’s an extra space or invisible character in the bad caption lines somewhere, or a glitch in the metadata for those segments. Doesn’t mean I know what to do to FIX it, of course… but that’s my theory as to why the line drops out.
Might try shifting the start or end of that particular caption box by one frame, see what changes?
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[Mark Suszko] “I’d be curious to read your follow-up messages on how you found and fixed this problem. “
In my case, I have no follow-up. This was just for QC. The caption company’s own QC viewer displays it, so I’m going to cross my fingers that it’s there. When I tried to fiddle with it in FCPX, that caption disappeared entirely. It’s quite simply not ready for prime time.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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You can double check the captions in QT or VLC.
Do they show up there?
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The captions aren’t embedded. Sidecar .scc file.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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VLC can add sidecar files. There’s a whole “Subtitle” menu.
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