[Jimm Retling]

The company I work for was asked to help re-edit and caption an infomercial. It was originally for the web, and we had to edit it to 28:30 and get captions done.

We outsourced to get the captions transcribed and asked for a .scc file. The spec sheet we got for video delivery from ABC did not mention captions at all.

Long story short: It was a nightmare figuring out how to get captions delivered to them. Neither the original media ingest site nor the outside company that replaced them would tell us what we needed to do to correctly deliver a mac edited movie with captions to them.

Here’s what finally worked:

Step one: We used an .scc file provided to us (by an American caption vendor*) to a QuickTime movie with Compressor 4. The specs were 720p, 59.94fps H264 at 45000 Kbps. The .scc file had to start at 00:00:00:00 because the .scc file that started at 01:00:00:00 would not work correctly or at all. (*The first vendor we used outsourced the job to Chile and the got all the idioms wrong.)

(Note: The first time we sent the aforementioned QuickTime movie, it worked. After that, subsequent movies we sent in came in garbled, according to the ingestion department. They looked fine on our end.)

We finally got an engineer that worked for the new ingestion company to tell us that they re-encode most files they receive to .mxf movies.

So hurray, they really want .xmf, not QuickTime or MPEG-2 files, which the spec sheet had listed.

After proofing the captions in QuickTime 7, I used Adobe Encoder CC 2014 and selected the XD HD 50 NTSC 720p60 preset to create an .mxf file. Please note that I had to manually change the preset so that the closed captions were embedded.

That finally worked.