Did FCPX update break caption embedding?

[Oliver Peters]

And the answer is…

The project (sequence) timecode has to start at 00:00:00:00 otherwise it doesn’t work. My sequence was set to start at 01:00:00:00. After modifying the sequence start back to 00:00:00:00, then closed captions were properly embedded (and visible) in the exported master file.

That doesn’t appear to be documented anywhere and certainly seems like a bug to me.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Eric Santiago]

Great find Oliver.
Is there an advantage to starting at your timecode?
I’ve always been at zero.
Mind you my experience with CC is mostly web-based docs.

[Oliver Peters]

[Eric Santiago] “Is there an advantage to starting at your timecode?”

It depends. This is really based on older broadcast standards and linear editing, but is often still requested by distributors.

Typically it would be a 01:00:00;00 (drop frame) start in the US and 10:00:00:00 in Europe. The idea being that bars and slate would be in the area of 00:58:00:00 to 01:00:00:00. You couldn’t start before 00:00:00:00 in linear TC, since that would be “rolling across midnight”.

In any case, it made timing easier for a linear editor, since the program would start at :00 (offset by 1 hour). Of course, in today’s file-based world, it doesn’t matter much, unless you have slates, bars, etc.

Regardless, this seems like a bug or an oversight. I’m pretty sure it worked with a 01:00:00:00 start before, but I could be wrong. It’s fine in Premiere, so it appears to be an issue with the application, not the closed caption standards or anything like that.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com