Sony Vegas Pro 12, Closed Captioning creation in Japanese

[Shunichi Daido]

Hi Michael,

I have never produced a CC on Vegas Pro so cannot help you from my own experience but I came across a page in Japanese where someone was briefly explaining how to add a CC in Japanese on Vegas Pro 10. The below is a Google’s on-line translation and I hope this helps.

https://translate.google.co.jp/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=ja&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww7a.biglobe.ne.jp%2F%7Efivetec%2Fvideo%2Fsony%2Fsony_entry040.html&edit-text=

[Michael Gibrall]

Thanks for trying to help.

The link is about how to actually create closed captioning, with instructions written in Japanese.

Cutting and pasting Japanese characters will physically go in, but when rendering the .scc file, there is no Japanese language to be found.

[Michael Gibrall]

I did some research, and found that Sony Vegas Pro supports closed captioning in the CEA608 and CEA708 standard.

https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/webhelp/vegaspro/12/enu/content/Adding_Closed_Captioning_to_Video_Files.htm

When doing a search on what the standards are, I found that CEA608 was the older, analog format, that supports English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, & Dutch only.

CEA708, the digital form of closed captioning, will accept characters from all languages.

https://www.3playmedia.com/2015/08/11/whats-the-difference-between-cea-608-line-21-captions-cea-708-captions/

I’m not in front of my editing computer right now, but when I am, I am going to see if i can toggle to cea708 closed captioning in the command drop-down menu when entering in the text.

[Michael Gibrall]

The following is what is stated on Sony’s web page devoted to Vegas:

Vegas Pro supports CEA608 captions and CEA708 containers containing CEA608 captions.

When rendering to XDCAM HD/HD422, CEA608 data is uplifted to CEA708 format so that CEA608 and CEA708 captions are available when playing via HD SDI. CEA608 CC1 is uplifted to CEA708 Service 1, and CEA608 CC3 is uplifted to CEA708 Service 2. Please note that caption positions can be slightly different after uplifting to CEA708.

When you render to a format that does not support embedded captioning markers, an .SCC file is created using the base name of the rendered media file.

When I went to render, I found XDCAM HD but no reference to HD422.

Am I missing something?

[John Rofrano]

[Michael Gibrall] “Vegas Pro supports CEA608 captions and CEA708 containers containing CEA608 captions.”

Read this carefully. What its saying is that they don’t support CEA708 captions natively. What they do is wrap CEA608 captions in a CEA708 container. That means no support for Japanese. Vegas Pro only supports the same languages as CEA608 does.

[Michael Gibrall] “When I went to render, I found XDCAM HD but no reference to HD422.”

HD422 is under Sony MXF. This format will embed the captions in the media.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Shunichi Daido]

Hi Michael,
If I am not mistaken, given the fact that VEGAS Pro is not capable of generating such 2-byte characters as Japanese in CC format, you could replace the English/German text with the relevant Japanese text at the time of creation of the final render media (whether DVD/Blu-ray or YouTube) because you already have the relevant CC file with the correct timings. I am not sure if the crude on-line translation I showed you an idea but that’s what it is essentially telling.

[John Rofrano]

[Shunichi Daido] “…you could replace the English/German text with the relevant Japanese text at the time of creation of the final render media (whether DVD/Blu-ray or YouTube) because you already have the relevant CC file with the correct timings.”

Are you talking about the Scenarist Closed Caption (.scc) file that Vegas Pro generates? There is no text in there to replace. It’s an encoded file that looks something like this:
Scenarist_SCC V1.0

01:02:53:14 94ae 94ae 9420 9420 947a 947a 97a2 97a2 a820 68ef f26e 2068 ef6e 6be9 6e67 2029 942c 942c 8080 8080 942f 942f

01:02:55:14 942c 942c

01:03:27:29 94ae 94ae 9420 9420 94f2 94f2 c845 d92c 2054 c845 5245 ae80 942c 942c 8080 8080 942f 942fGood luck trying to convert that from English into Japanese. It simply can’t be done. I’m pretty sure that analog CEA-608 only supports singe byte characters so even after Vegas Pro wraps it in a digital CEA-708 container, it still only supports single byte languages.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Shunichi Daido]

Hi John, thank you for the comment. I am aware that SCC is encoded hence no direct text conversion there; however, there are free utilities e.g. Subtitle Edit which appear to be able to read SCC files and convert them to a text format you can actually edit. That’s what the original article hinted. (I am sorry if the crude translation did not give that idea.) I am just trying to be helpful here with a workaround, rather than relaying on CC on Vegas Pro, of which use I have never had an experience. Best regards.

[John Rofrano]

Yea, I believe that method never tries to get the CC burned back into the video by Vegas Pro. That’s where it will most likely fail. If you don’t need to embed the captions, an external caption file will probably work with some other system that supports it.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com