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Posted by nobody special on 12/20/05 02:26
CCaption by Leapfrog has been avaialble for quite some time now.
BTW, there's a front-page article in this week's TV Technology magazine
that details the closed-captioning rules that come into effect Jan. 1.
It's NOT all programming that has to be so captioned, there are
numerous loopholes and exclusions. But the thing to worry about is your
live news coverage. The article detailed how one West Coast station did
many extra live hours covering a huge brushfire ont he outskirts of
town. just the sort of public service you'd want to reward them for.
FCC fined them because they didn't caption any of it. They'd have been
better off from a regulatory standpoitn had they just run syn dicated
TV reruns instead of the life emergency coverage.
Many news operations count on using the prompter copy from their
automated news promting system to feed an encoder for live captioning,
and that's not going to cut it in 2006.
The article went on to say they polled Captioning services and gear
makers, and could document no huge late-year upswing in purchases,
concluding most stations are either blissfully ignorant or have long
ago made their preparations. My guess is most are counting on live
telephone hookups to transcriptionists working from their homes,
because they only work as and when you need them, whereas an in-house
guy doing this full-time costs you salary plus benefits. It's always
about doing it the cheapest way, not the best way... My shop uses such
an over the phone service both for live work and to caption dubs in a
hurry. The hardware based encoding station we use (I think it's called
Lynx or something like that) looks like Fred Flintstone used it first;
it's slow, complicated, finnicky, breaks down often, takes one guy all
day to caption an hour, only one guy in the shop understands how to get
it to work.
OTOH The live transcriptionist does a fair but not perfect job in
real-time. She's better if you send her a window dub and/or script
ahead of time, so she can pre-program odd or unexpected words and terms
into her system.
We used to assume all NLE systems digitizing video obliterated any
existing cc line 20 information. We found out at least one of our
NLE's, digitizing from an SD analog input, kept the CC information
intact, and moreover, spit back out an editied, SD analog dub with the
captioning still working. Obviously, there were no captions on parts
that were newly inserted, but if all you did was cut something down
shorter, it did work.
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