Closed Captioning

[Mark Hollis]

Closed Captioning in NTSC happens on Line 21. You can set a Betacam-SP player to not blank that line on playback. It’s in the menu settings on most SP decks.

Now, if you need to edit the material and you’re just inserting a few shots, you will destroy the captioning as you add video on top of (or substituted for) the video from your original captioned source.

So here’s what you do:

Make a two or three-line alpha mask using Adobe’s Photoshop.
Insert the original (captioned) material on your top video layer (you won’t need audio).
Use your Alpha Mask from Photoshop to just insert line 21 and maybe a couple of lines around it.
Verify your work on a monitor that reads captioning.

You should be good to go.

Make sure you save your “Line 21” alpha from Photoshop for the next time you have this problem.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Jason Livingston]

Hello Kyle,
Sorry if this reply is too late to help.

If you capture the video and then compress it to MPEG-2 for DVD, the captions will be lost. This is because MPEG-2 for DVD is 720×480 and doesn’t include the line 21 area where closed caption data is stored for analog video like BetaSP. The captions are stored separately as metadata on the disc, so they need to be extracted and converted using a special process.

The easiest option would be to use a set-top DVD recorder (like a VCR that records on DVDs). These internally convert the analog line 21 caption data into DVD closed captions when recording. If you need to have custom menus or chapters, you could then extract the MPEG-2 (which will include the caption metadata) off that DVD, and re-author a new DVD without re-compressing the video.

Another option would be to send the tapes to a caption service company which can extract the closed caption data and e-mail you a .SCC file, which you can bring into Adobe Encore or another professional DVD authoring program to author a DVD with closed captions.

If closed captioning is something you deal with a lot, you might want to consider purchasing software so that you can author & convert captions and subtitles on your own system.

Jason Livingston
CPC Closed Captioning