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Creating closed captions to particular specs
Hi guys,
Sorry for my ignorance on this topic. I’ve done a fair bit of searching, but it seems this is a bit of a voodoo-ish topic.
I received a request to create closed captions on a 15-sec spot, to the specs below. Captions do not exist in any form at the moment. I would be creating them, and then embedding into the file in one of these two ways:
HD files can be supplied with captioning using one of the following methods:
– 1920×1080 XDCAM HD422 MXF file with a SMPTE 436m Data Track
– 1920×1080 Mpeg2 file with EIA708/608 captions carried in the video trackIs this something I can do easily, starting from Premiere? Is there an easy third party workflow?
I basically just need to know if I can confidently say I can do this, or if it’s better left to a company.
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2 Replies
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Premiere Pro isn’t really the place where you want to create captions. Premiere’s intended use of captions is for ‘re-use’. However, you CAN create them from scratch, it is just laborious. You might look at a plugin called ZenCaptions as a way to do this cheaply by someone else if the project is a long form project. Broadcasters use services or purchase products like MacCaption to do this in volume
To answer your questions, I do believe we support the first of the two deliverable methods you outlined. MXF with SMPTE 436M. You can get a lot of the details here: https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/closed-captioning.html
HTH,
Dennis – Adobe guy -
Hi Perry,
we have used 3Play Media (https://www.3playmedia.com) to create our caption files. On their site, you upload a low res reference movie and they will either: a) transcribe and create a closed caption file for your movie OR b) you may upload your own transcript and they will do an alignment of your transcript to your movie and create the caption file for you (alignment only is cheaper than transcription and alignment, if you already have a transcript).
We then utilize Telestream Episode to marry together the SCC file with the master ProRes 1920 x 1080 movie file (or whatever master format you utilize). We output a 1920 x 1080 MPEG2 Program Stream compressed movie via Telestream Episode compression software.
PLEASE NOTE: it is critical that the time-code for your SCC file has the same start time as the time code for your 1920 x 1080 movie coming out of your NLE. Otherwise, the captions will not line up.
This method creates a final MPEG 2 Program Stream 1920 x 1080 movie file with 608 captions carried in the video track.
Jennifer Isenhart
Wide Eye Productions
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