Captions-Network Broadcast

[Christopher Burke]

Hi Greg —
I haven’t done it yet, but I am currently posting a show for an NBC cable network as well (still in FCP7, looking to move to PPro for the next go around). I’d be curious to hear what your experience is with this.

Interestingly, for my show, NBC has us create the caption file, and they insert it on their end (strange, but I’m not complaining as it’s one less potential hiccup on my end!)

[Don Hertz]

We do it to about 50 broadcast shows a week and it works flawlessly. We drop the master on V1, an scc file on V2 and export to Quicktime using an XDCAM HD422 codec. I’ve done tests with ProRes and that worked fine too. I would suggest contacting NBC and finding out what file formats they accept for delivery and then sending them a short test. We are required to submit Omneon ready files, so once we create our Quicktime XDCAM master file, with captions embedded, we drop it into our transcoder which converts it to Omneon before we ship the files out the door.

I’m not entirely sure Premiere is embedding the captions in a “standard” location inside the Quicktime file. Our file analysis system can’t locate them and tells us there is no captions present – although every software package we use, including our Vantage transcoder, see the captions just fine so I haven’t worried about it too much. I had the makers of our file analysis software look at one of the Quicktime files Premiere was exporting and they told me they eventually found the captions but that they were being saved in a non-standard location within the file and their system, at this time, wouldn’t be able to “see” the captions. That may just be a flaw in their product but I’m not sure. Also, when we initially started testing a variety of file formats, before settling on Omneon for delivery, we tried sending the Quicktime XDCAM HD files directly to our head end and they initially said they couldn’t see the captions – until they adjusted a setting in their own transcoder and I was told “found them”. Then everything was fine. All of that is beyond my knowledge at the moment but makes me wary enough that we always send test files whenever we make any changes to our encode settings just to make sure the captions don’t disappear again.

Another positive note, we take our master XDCAM files and re-open them on other workstations, change out bumps, commercials, and add promos and then re-export to a variety of other deliverables. The caption files come back into Premiere perfectly when we re-import the file, trim just like video, and then re-embed when we export with all the changes. Still seems like a miracle – but it’s saved us hundreds of hours of labor since CC’s release.

Sincerely,

Don Hertz

[Greg Jones]

We are having another company , Caption Max, do the captions. They are sending us back a .scc file. From what I understand is that I should be able to put that on the top most layer and turn captions on. NBC takes ProRes Files so we are going to export the doc as a prores with captions turned on. I’ve done a couple of tests and, at least, QuickTime player recognizes the captions, so we’ll see what happens. We are supposed to upload in a couple of weeks. Thanks for the replies.

Greg Jones
D7, Inc