[Jason Livingston]

Hi Stephen,
If you’re airing in the USA or Canada, don’t forget about closed captioning software. Sending tapes out to get captioned has a lot of drawbacks and is more expensive and time consuming in the long run. You can do all of your own captioning in house to save time & money and also ensure quality control stays in your own hands.

The good news is that the legacy caption encoding hardware is no longer necessary, it can all be done in software right on your NLE systems.

Thanks,

Jason Livingston
CPC

[Jason Livingston]

You make a good point, although not everyone has a DigiBeta or similar high-end SD deck and tape stock lying around. 🙂

[Jason Livingston]

Ditto on what Jon and Ken said. I was thinking of posting something like this myself and I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more often.

I’ve seen a lot of suggested HD-to-SD workflows for FCP and Compressor, but anyone who knows what good SD looks like will know that most of them look terrible. (I’ve actually done empirical tests using res charts and the loss of quality is obvious.) Some people say “well that’s just what SD looks like” or “you have to watch it on a SD TV to see what it really looks like,” but I’ve seen what a good hardware downconvert looks like and there is no comparison.

Sure you can print to SD tape and capture back in via a video card with hardware downconversion, but who has time for that?

[Jason Livingston]

Hi Dennis,
The black movie method only works for 720×486 video (via a Matrox, AJA, Blackmagic, etc.), while DV is 720×480 (the caption data is stored elsewhere as metadata). So you can’t use the black movie method for DV Firewire workflows. For your tape workflow you need DV video with embedded captions. In Final Cut Pro 7 there is a slightly easier workflow, but it would only work on your Intel machine.

For your tapeless workflow, you have to use a MPEG-2 compressor which can read your closed captions and convert them into the necessary metadata during the compression to MPEG-2. The ones that can do this tend to be expensive. MacCaption-DTV or higher can also embed captions into MPEG-2 after the compression step.

Caption tracks are timecode-dependent and cannot be edited just by cutting up or moving around video on the timeline (unless you use our Assemble Captions feature). In almost all cases, any edits or renders will delete all caption data. Without having MacCaption in house, you’d have to get your videos re-captioned after any edits.

If you’re looking for a caption company to this for you, just ask for one that uses MacCaption (most of them do).

If you want to bring it in house, give CPC a call and we can discuss the various options with you.

Hope this helps,

Jason Livingston
CPC

[Jason Livingston]

Hi Alan,
When you capture HD video with closed captions through the KONA card, the closed captioning data is stored as a QuickTime DTV 608/708 track. This track only works for HD video. The KONA cards or Compressor do not currently preserve this data during down-convert, nor can they process this data into the QuickTime 608 captions track needed for standard definition.

The AJA FS1 can do this to baseband video (prior to capture) as can some other devices.

At this time the only software which can read this track and convert it to a standard definition captioning track is MacCaption by CPC.

This page has some more information about closed captioning workflows with the KONA cards: https://cpcweb.com/hdtv/aja_workflow.htm

Hope this helps,

Jason Livingston
CPC

[Jason Livingston]

Hi Simon,
That white stripe has nothing to do with the closed captioning, it’s a QuickTime display aperture problem.

If you need CableLabs compliance with closed captioning then Compressor is not the way to go IMHO.

Rhozet Carbon Coder can take .scc files and generate the SCTE-20 & CEA-608 closed caption data during the encode to CableLabs MPEG-2 transport stream, so that is one option. I believe Flip Factory & Digital Rapids can do this as well, but not Episode.

MacCaption can import .SCC and then add SCTE-20, CEA-608 & CEA-708 closed captions directly to MPEG-2 transport streams, provided you also have Manzanita’s multiplexer installed so that the stream can be re-muxed to CableLabs compliance.

For more information see: https://cpcweb.com/hdtv/manzanita.htm

Hope this helps,

Jason Livingston
CPC

[Jason Livingston]

Hi Simon,
Can you be more specific about what you mean by Video on Demand? There are a lot of different kinds of VOD and they use different kinds of closed captioning. Is this for a website, or for a Cable/Satellite network?

By white stripe, do you mean a series of white dots and dashes as the top horizontal line of the video? That would be line 21 closed captioning, used by analog SD systems. If it is something other than that, then it’s probably not closed captioning related (a screenshot might help though).

Hope this helps,

Jason Livingston
CPC

[Jason Livingston]

Hello Duke,
As Gary said, FCP7’s closed captioning workflows have only been tested for 1080i/720p 59.94 so far, which is what DTV broadcasts are delivered at (as far as I know, you cannot broadcast native 24p). Native 24p/Psf was never really intended to work on the delivery side where closed captioning comes into play.

That being said, there are always alternatives. If you would like to discuss some alternate workflows for your situation, please give CPC a call.

Hope this helps,

Jason Livingston
CPC

[Jason Livingston]

Hi Chris,
Yes I’m almost certain the LHe is compatible, we’ve just been focusing on the Kona 3 and LHi first. We’ll have more info soon.

Thanks,

Jason Livingston
CPC

[Jason Livingston]

Hello Izzy,
It sounds like you’ve got a couple of workflow issues here.

1. SCC files cannot be used for HD closed captioning because they only contain CEA-608 data, which is the analog SD captioning standard. If you try to use a .scc file when your output format is HD, FCP7 is supposed to give you a warning that the caption file is not compatible with the output format, however for some reason the warning doesn’t always appear.

DTV broadcasts require CEA-708 closed caption data. At this time, CPC’s MacCaption software is the world’s only CEA-708 software encoder which doesn’t require a hardware caption encoder. MacCaption can import a .scc file and upconvert the data to a CEA-708 track for FCP7 and AJA KONA high definition output. MacCaption also has an Assemble Captions feature which allows you to edit previously captioned videos in FCP without having to re-caption the whole thing from scratch.

2. Currently, FCP7 with AJA KONA only supports closed captioning in 1080i29.97 and 720p59.94 frame rates, not 24p. (Technically it is possible to put captions on native 24p video, but only very high end professional gear can display native 24p with captions. DTV broadcasts are always 720p59.94 or 1080i29.97, so you will have to telecine your 24p video to 60i/60p at some point.)

CPC has worked with AJA and Apple to develop these workflows. We are the industry’s “go-to” people for closed captioning solutions. Please call or e-mail us, or check out our website at the link below if you’d like to learn about our solutions.

Jason Livingston
CPC