[Jeff Carr]

Jason, thank you for the guidance. The MacCaption demo confirmed that our captions are intact.

As far as capturing via SDI vs. analog–we tried it both ways. Neither way worked as far as FCP7 generating a Quicktime closed caption track. In looking over the documentation again, I’m thinking FCP7 may possibly generate a Quicktime caption track only if the capture setting is uncompressed and the source material is high definition with closed captions in the VANC.

Since both high definition and standard definition TV can contain “ancillary” information in the vertical blanking interval, I had the impression that both HD and SD had a “VANC.” But, in reality it seems that the term “VANC” really only applies to the HD world. So, it would appear that FCP7 will not generate a Quicktime closed caption track from standard definition material.

I would appreciate it if someone could prove me wrong. At any rate, if we capture our standard definition archived tape programs using a 720×486 capture setting, the closed captions are at least preserved at the top of the image; and, we know that MacCaption can open them. Thank you for your help!

–Jeff Carr

[Jeff Carr]

Jason,

Thank you for confirming our experience. We are puzzled; the documentation we’ve found on both FCP7 and Black Magic seem to indicate that that we should indeed be able to get a quicktime caption track when we capture previously-captioned material.

You mentioned using MacCaption to extract the line 21 and convert it to QuickTime CC track; what would be the workflow for this? Can we test it using the MacCaption demo?

–Jeff Carr

[Jeff Carr]

Jason,

We have been trying to set up our workflow so that when we capture video from our archive which contains closed captions on line 21, we get the line 21 converted to a QuickTime CC track; in other words, we want to be able to open the resulting quicktime file using Quicktime Player and be able to display the captions. We are using FCP 7 on our Mac Pro workstations, Black Magic Decklink card/Multibridge Extreme, the latest drivers, and we have tried capturing to uncompressed as well as Apple ProRes. So far, we have not been able to convert line 21 to a quicktime CC track during capture–the “Show Closed Captioning” under the View tab of the Quicktime Player is greyed out. Line 21 is definitely showing up at the top of the video, both before and after capture. We can view the opened captions when we play back the freshly-captured file using FCP to a monitor with caption display turned on–but Quicktime is not getting the captions in a form it can see. Your Oct. 1, 2010 post seems to indicate this should be possible. Any Suggestions? Thank you for your help. –Jeff Carr