[Giovanni Galvez]

Yep I can flip the YouTube script with MacCaption to subtitles with alpha channel. Drop me a line and I can help.

[Giovanni Galvez]

Hi Ron,

I believe it means that now the IO HD can capture and playback the VANC 708 HD captioning as well as line 21 608 SD captioning via SDI connection. The HD part was previously not possible. The QuickTime mov that is captured through the IO HD can also display the HD captioning in QuickTime Player.

In addition, it means that users running FCP 7.0.1 can take advantage of the new closed captioning features in the Print to tape and Edit to tape menus.

[Giovanni Galvez]

I’m not sure what the best solution would be.

But here at the shop we do a lot of testing and recently purchased a MacPro with Snow Leopard pre-installed.

Since half of the software we use is running on Leopard already. We swapped the hard drive in the mac pro and just put in one with Leopard on it. That way we could still get our work done and when we have more time swap it out with the Snow Leopard one and experiment.

Might be the most immediate solution to your problem. But I admit it’s a work around.

[Giovanni Galvez]

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that HD captioning work from FCP7 and the Kona card.

Also, it’s not really necessary to buy new software. Just go with a caption service company that has MacCaption. This 708 CC track is e-mailable just like the SCC file.

I know of a lot of companies who have MacCaption. As someone needing the 708 CC track I suggest asking caption service companies and post houses to e-mail this 708 CC track instead of the SCC.

[Giovanni Galvez]

“Source tape is DVCpro 25 and has cc data on it which I want to retain as I bring the footage into FCP and out again. Can you reccommend the best settings to not lose the CC data. Do I have to capture it as composite video, or can I bring it in SDI 8-bitand still keep the CC data. Just as important, what setting to get it all back out to DVCPro25 again? I’m going to try to add a graphic over the top of the captioned program without breaking the captioning. It may not work, I know, any advice is welcome.”

Hi,

This is Giovanni from CPC MacCaption. You can capture the DVCpro25 video via firewire and retain the captions if you do not have a capture card. However, if you edit the video in anyway you will loose the captions. This is because DV25 video puts the captions in the digital VAUX area in the DV codec. Because it is 720×480 it does not have the correct aspect ratio and resolution to place the Line-21 VBI in the active video. If you decide to output your DV25 video out of the component, composite, S-Video, or SDI outputs of your DVCpro25 deck then the 720×480 DV25 video on the tape will be up-converted to 720×486 with Line-21 VBI.

If you are capturing the up-converted 720×486 video from your capture card (AJA, BlackMagic) then there is a way to preserve the captions in FCP even if you do edits or renders. It’s important to not use the DV25 codec while you capture because this will crop out and eliminate the Line-21 VBI. Rather use something like 8 bit uncompressed, or ProRes.

If you are capturing Firewire then MacCaption can retrieve the captions from the DV25 codec before any edits are done and re-apply them to the finished edit. (this workflow is a work around if no capture cards are found)

Really this is the best practice even if you can capture and preserve the captions in FCP. If edits are going to be made the best thing is to retrieve the captions and store them separately to the video because any edits or cuts may compromise the quality of the text in the captions. Then re-apply them after the edit is done.

Because of the nature of CC codes that your TV reads to generate the text over video. A cut in the wrong place in FCP may result in your captions getting garbled or simply not appearing at all during the first couple of on-screen dialogues.

DVD-Video captions work similarly to DV25 in that the active video is actually 720×480 and not 720×486. Therefore, when you apply an SCC file before you burn a DVD in DVDSP the program actually puts special codes in the MPEG-2 that your DVD player at home can read. When you play a DVD out of a DVD player it does an up-convert from 720×480 to 720×486 and if it sees caption codes in the MPEG-2 it will also generate Line 21 VBI our of it’s component and composite outputs.

Some set-top DVD Recoders will do the same if they are recording TV. It will down-convert 720×486 to 720×480 and place the Line 21 VBI into special codes in the MPEG-2 data.

As far as the Matrox MXO2 is concerned it is the MOST elegant and practical solution for HD-SDI captioning. If anyone has an MXO2 and is going to output to HD-SDI then I can literally e-mail them the captions with a tiny .ZIP file that contains the audio with captioned data for their FCP timeline.

So if I’m in Washington, D.C. and my editor is in L.A. I can e-mail him his captions for the HD show. No more sending out his tape to the dub house. All thanks to Jean Lapierre and all the folks at Matrox for such a ground breaking solution and innovation with the MXO2 board.