Closed captioning DVD

[Christopher Smith]

Hi David

You have encoded your captions into the video file which you exported from Premiere, but that is only for broadcast. You have to mux your video (.m2v), audio (.ac3), and caption file (.scc) together to make a VOB which goes on the DVD. All that muxing and assembling of the DVD happens when you Build the disc in DVDSP. DVDSP doesn’t know to look in your video file to find the captions, and the way the program works during the Build process is only with an SCC file. If you don’t give it an SCC file, it doesn’t put captions into that VOB or video selection on the disc.

I haven’t tried exporting the captions from Premiere as an SCC file, but it appears from Adobe’s support site that it is possible to do that. You would then select that SCC file in the Other tab of the Track Editor dialog.

According to Adobe’s site, you can export a VOB from Premiere, so the muxing of video, audio, and captions would take place at that point. However, you would then be on your own to incorporate that VOB into your disc, without the help of DVDSP to link the flow of the rest of the disc to your VOB. Basically, you’d have to build a track with your video (and don’t worry about telling DVDSP about the captions), Build the disc, and then replace the VOB that DVDSP built with the one you exported from Premiere, which would have the captions built in. I’ve never done that, and now you have me wondering if that wouldn’t be a fun project to try!

Christopher Smith

CBN International