stealing Close Caption info from HD

[Jason Livingston]

Hi Aaron,
If you are talking about uncompressed HD over HD-SDI, then the captions are in the VANC on line 9. But unlike SD formats, which store the extra lines as part of the image, compressed HD formats (e.g. HDCAM, XDCAM HD, DVCPRO-HD, etc.) store the VANC lines (including captions) as metadata packets. Each format uses a totally different workaround to stuff the caption packets somewhere in the bitstream, which is why HD captioning is so hard. (There are also many HD formats which don’t support closed captioning at all, such as XDCAM EX, HDV, AVCHD, etc.)

Right now, the only I/O device which can preserve HD captions on HD-SDI capture and playback is the Matrox MXO2.

If you have an MXO2 you can capture captions as a separate “Matrox 4VANC” track and re-use that track in any sequence. It even works during up/down/cross conversion, so you can play the same HD track out to HD-SDI and analog SD simultaneously and both will have captions. If you also want to edit, re-purpose (e.g. re-use the same captions for your DVD or web projects), or create captions from scratch, the MXO2 workflow is supported by CPC’s MacCaption software for closed captioning.

You might want to take a look at this page for more information: https://www.cpcweb.com/hdtv/

Hope this helps,
Jason
CPC

[Richard Sanchez]

I don’t believe so. Digibeta stores the caption data on Line 21 of the VBI, but HD tapes use VANC.

Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks

[Aaron Neitz]

Thanks guys!

[Rob Hazan]

I’m making a straight dub from a CC encoded HDCam to XDCam (using the HD422 codec). How can I ensure that my CC makes it onto the XDCam intact?
I’m using an F1600 XD deck.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Rob H