Problems with MacCaption and FCP???

[Stevec]

We’re using MacCaption to close caption our long form shows.
Occasionally we will have the following issue…

After importing the NLE quicktime movie that MacCaption exports, placing it on the top video track and croping the video to 99, so that the underlying layer is visable, but the captioning is still there. we will go back and double check the settings before we render it and the y-axis is set to -1.
We haven’t touched anything in the motion tab except the bottom crop.

Has anyone else had this problem and if so what is causing it and how can we correct it.

I’ve been saying we because this is happening on 3 different systems.

One thing I forgot to add.

Our FCP timeline is DV/DVCPRO, I think the NLE quicktime is being exported in Animation and once combined we render it as 8 Bit Uncompressed

Thanks

Steve

[Jeffrey]

I didn’t think you would be able to use the export NLE movie-superimpose it onto the timeline-and crop method with Final Cut Pro? I was told that since the DV screen size is 720×480 it wouldn’t work because a line 21 caption must be used with a 720×486 picture.

[Stevec]

Sorry, forgot a step.
We change the aspect ratio in sequence settings to CCIR 601 NTSC (40:27) that gives you a frame size of 720 x 486. We also change the Quicktime Video Settings Compressor to 8 Bit uncompressed, as I mentioned before, or else you can’t see an image.

Steve

[Jeffrey]

So are you able to see any captions when this -1 shift happens? Or do you need to manaually reset the y-axis to 0 to see the captions?

Also, the reasoning for changing the compressor to 8-bit uncompressed, aside from a picture quality standpoint, does that setting allow you to use line 21 captions? (as opposed to storing the caption information in the DV signal like when using the DV-NTSC codec?) I ask because we are looking into getting the full version of MacCaption (we have been tinkering with the demo for a little while now) and want to find the best workflow before we buy. We were convinced that we would need to do the “export movie with captions” option in MacCaption to export an entire episode (in DV-NTSC) as one big file with the captions encoded into the DV stream.

[Stevec]

Jeff;

We can see the captions when the -1 shift happens, but one of our networks that airs the shows told us that they could not carry the caption over to whatever they convert it to because the caption signal was like at 50%. When we manually change the y-axis to 0 it airs fine.

We are going to 8bit uncompressed so that we can output the shows from our 3 final cut systems going through our AJA Io boxes.

I actually just got off the phone with a guy from MacCaption and he said that we could take a single exported movie of the show, Bring it into MacCaption add the captioning and then “export movie with captions” likw you said and either lay to tape directly from the MacCaption software or bring it back into FCP tp do the laydown.

Steve

[Jeffrey]

Yeah, that’s the way we were thinking of doing it. The only downside being that exporting a whole 1/2 hour show to a Quicktime takes a long time, and is a step that was not needed until this captioning law went into effect.