Thank you Sony one step closer to broadcast

LongTallTexan wrote on 4/13/2010, 5:03 AM
Haven't seen anyone mention this yet. The full implimentation of closed captioning is huge. Not only can you load caption scripts but you can create captions from scratch in the timeline by inserting comands. this is a big step forward for us folks who edit for broadcast. Been kicking it around a bit and very impressed. Intrsted in other comments on this new feature.

L.T.

Comments

ingvarai wrote on 4/13/2010, 5:15 AM
I must admit I have no idea what this is, at all..
Ingvar
LongTallTexan wrote on 4/13/2010, 5:28 AM
Closed captioning is like subtitles for DVDs but for broadcast television. It is required by the FCC to be included on all broadcast television. Until now broadcast editors had to pay a third party to insert them into your video. A per min cost. This is a powerful new feature and it will save me personally about 4 grand for 26 episodes.

L.T.
apit34356 wrote on 4/13/2010, 5:36 AM
Yes, this a very good step for broadcast I think. Metadata management is Now and the Future direction of editing and post-work.
farss wrote on 4/13/2010, 5:40 AM
From what I can see it's very crude.
CCs can be positioned on the screen and set to different colors etc.
I don't see any ability to do this or even preview the outcome.


Bob.
Earl_J wrote on 4/13/2010, 5:41 AM
Hello L.T.,
so, I imagine this is part of the 9.0d release, yes?
Available now? hmmm... yes, very intriguing... and quite a step forward...

UPDATE: Just found the sticky at the top of the forum ... looking it over now.
Most excellent...!

Until that time... Earl J.
LongTallTexan wrote on 4/13/2010, 5:56 AM
If you look through the release notes, not only can you change colors and what not but also do pop up style cc's and role up determine viewable lines. This is more then required by FCC and for independent folks like me, more then enough. I agree the previewing of the cc's is an issue but you can render a windows media file with them embeded and view through media player. I spoke with Sony on the floor at nab and they were inserting and demonstrating it on the floor. I haven't figured it all out yet, but I will before the end if the week I promise you. Nice to see Sony targeting broadcast with production assistant and now CC's certainly tells me we are heading in a new direction with Vegas. Can't wait to see what's in 10. This is a nice number upgrade.

L.T.
LongTallTexan wrote on 4/13/2010, 6:11 AM
Another super cool feature. You can make a four colum XL spreadsheet, open the edit list in Vegas cut and paste the spreadsheet with your script. Change the edit list to comand prompts and then highlight the first line, press play on the timeline and when you get to your first caption spot press control K and it will insert the first line and move to the next. Real time inserting of comand line captioning. Pretty impressive. Not so crude to me. I feel like a kid in a candy store. All of this is laid out in the release notes

L.T.
Coursedesign wrote on 4/13/2010, 6:21 AM
I think SCS has made a great, very timely move with their new broadcast focus.

News bureaus everywhere are laying off people, and TV journalists who previously saw only the lens shade side of the cameras now are increasingly expected to stand both in front of and behind the camera, and then edit the result when they're back in their offices.

That is quite a challenge as you can imagine, and Vegas is uniquely positioned because of its far more intuitive editing paradigm that is much easier to learn than the classical industry standard way, and its support for more advanced but often legally required features such as captioning.

winrockpost wrote on 4/13/2010, 6:30 AM
not to mention one step closer to govco work,, cccaption is a must and I have been editing in vegas , finishing in another app for captions... of course need to get this into dvda to complete the workflow for me, Sure like to try it out but blew my trial on the initial release of 9, gonna try to load it and see what happens
PerroneFord wrote on 4/13/2010, 6:50 AM
This will extend the useful life of Vegas for me. I just need to sort out some of these other install issues I am hearing about. Right now, I can't upgrade to 9.0d on any of my work machines because I have projects going. Maybe I'll try to get it on a secondary machine and see how it works.

Does anyone know what kind of caption files it reads? Is it just .SCC files?
LongTallTexan wrote on 4/13/2010, 6:57 AM
you can generate files from XL spredsheets, or even in word. it does recognize SCC files. On a side note, I am in the middle of rendering 26 episodes of my series to be delivered for broadcast and am having no issues with 9.0D. just my case. Lots of notes on captioning in the help files now on Vegas.

L.T.
PerroneFord wrote on 4/13/2010, 8:16 AM
I am not interested in generating files from Excel or Word. I am interested in getting back compatible files from our captioning service. They can give me back timed captioned files in a lot of formats (including SCC) but for other work I prefer to get files in Adobe Encore or Avid compatible formats.

I am just wondering if there is a published list of file formats this will support (meaning read automatically, and lay onto the timeline).
LongTallTexan wrote on 4/13/2010, 8:56 AM
Scc files can be loaded into your file. So again yes
LongTallTexan wrote on 4/13/2010, 2:11 PM
Not sure why you would want to pay a service for what you can do now with a simple office file but if you insist there is a detailed description of what it will accept in the release notes of the upgrade as well as the help files in the program itself. As for me and my shows I would rather do it myself. By the way if you have a captioning service generating scc files it's not much more expensive to have them drop them on your video as well. This is more a benifit for those that don't want to pay the per min charge for those services. My 26 episodes alone would have cost me around 4 grand. In this market most people will jump on this.

L.T.
PerroneFord wrote on 4/13/2010, 6:54 PM
1. We pay a service because it's cheaper than my hourly rate to do it. And I have zero interest in transcribing hours upon hours of unscripted video. If you are doing scripted shows, that is vastly different.

2. I am happy you are happy to do your shows yourself. But what works for you doesn't necessarily work for me.

3. I do not expect my captioning service to deal with my video, nor would I want them to. They get an audio file uploaded to them, they transcribe it, and email me back a transcript and caption files in the formats I specify. I generally get captions suitable for use in quicktime, WMV, Adobe Encore, Avid, and they send an SCC by default.

4. I agree, that people in the market will jump on this if they work similarly to you. I doubt people in my position will find it economical to do self captioning unless it's on very small shows or there is an existing script.
Steve Mann wrote on 4/14/2010, 1:26 AM
"I think SCS has made a great, very timely move with their new broadcast focus"

And 25 feet away at the other Sony pavilion, the Sony sales reps were demonstrating with FCP.

More missed opportunities for SCS.

At least SCS had their own pavillion adjacent to the giant Sony pavilion. Not just a table between cameras and Blu-print.
LongTallTexan wrote on 4/14/2010, 12:55 PM
Perrone

Not sure what the beef is. I told you that the new CC feature works with SCC files which you keep saying is what you get. If that is all you need then bingo smile about it. I have produced TV for years and I dont transcribe myself, My shows have scripted hosting segments and live concert footage which song lyrics can be redilly found online. This makes this a super easy fix for me. I dont know what type of TV you do where you have no script maby reality stuff or hidden camera. Dont know and really dont care as it is none of my business. All I have tried to do is answere your question from my professional prospective and you keep asking the same thing. So the last time, if your service gives you SCC then this is right up your alley. Read the release notes, or simply load one of your scripts into a project and see for your self. But dont simply naysay without trying it out. Hell who knows you might like it.

L.T.
PerroneFord wrote on 4/14/2010, 4:28 PM
Dude,

I am not naysaying anything. And I appreciate the information. You said you didn't understand why I would pay for someone to do captioning for me, and I merely tried to explain the why.

For the record, many of my "shows" are conferences, live events that are recorded for later use, or interviews. So they are totally unscripted and in some cases, 2-8 hours long. My governmental responsibility is to ensure those videos are captioned whether they be for broadcast or not. I have to caption (not necessarily closed caption) every video I create for work, and in 95% of the cases, it's unscripted.

Hopefully, you better understand my position now. I am not trying to argue with you, I have no beef with you, I am merely trying to clarify my position, and my intended use.
apit34356 wrote on 4/14/2010, 4:35 PM
"So they are totally unscripted and in some cases, 2-8 hours " Ouch! That could be a real time killer and legal liability could be a problem.
PerroneFord wrote on 4/14/2010, 4:43 PM
Legal liability is exactly why I use a service. I've got a shelf full of material that couldn't be used because we couldn't get it captioned effectively. I can't even distribute it in-house if it's not captioned.
winrockpost wrote on 4/14/2010, 5:07 PM
just a couple of interviews aint worth doing myself.take me longer to type it up , than sending of a mp3 alnd getting back cc in any flavor I want.... long live stenographers
LongTallTexan wrote on 4/14/2010, 5:12 PM
Wow super tedious. Hope this feature helps with all of that. Seems painful. My shows are 30 min concert with studio hosting segments. I have been really trying to wrap my brain around this feature and it does have it's drawbacks. From what I understand there is no way to preview the captions as you are checking for acuracy. Gonna get back in this Mon and figure it all out. Didn't mean to sound like a jerk, I'm on some crazy deadlines and swimming in deadlines.


L.T.
Cooldraft wrote on 4/14/2010, 8:19 PM
This sounds great. Guess I have to download or can you tell me if you print to tape and the CC are there. Render to a file and they are in there?
filmy wrote on 4/14/2010, 8:28 PM
First of all - hello everyone, I am not dead. Been busy - and I head that after years of me asking Vegas finally had put in line 21/CC ability.

"Woooooooooohhhhh" says me. So I look into it and it is all a bit confusing. For those asking the old RTFM comes into play. Look at chapter 17 and it explains it. First you see the little box NOTE that says it supports CEA608 captions and CEA708 containers containing CEA608 captions. CEA708 is not supported.

It supports import of captions via XDCAM HD and XDCAM HD422 MXF files.

If you are creating line 21 captions you can import a CC file in the SCC (Scenarist Closed Caption) format....and only that format.

You can edit/add now info on the timeline provided you follow the format correctly. It is all explained in the manual.

Now the "misleading" part - yes it does support it but the abilty to render them is limited. It says when you render to XDCAM HD and XDCAM HD422 MXF you need to have the "Save project markers in Media" box checked. It than states the rendering to a "format that does not support embedding captioning markers an scc file is created using the base name of the rendered media file." Now that is very cryptic - why? because a .scc file is also generated when you render out an XDCAM HD or XDCAM HD422 MXF file as well, so really one has no idea if the format you are using is actually taking the line 21 data. The manual does state that when/if you load a file that has captions it will import them as well - however in a test as long as ther is an SCC file in the same place as the imported file it does import the captions - delete the scc file and guess what? No captions import.

To slighty complicate things more there is another method for adding captions to WMV files.

So in my brief tests - render to DV AVI did not take. Render to MPEG (DVD) did not take.

If one does a search you may still fine my post from several years ago on the matter but to get .scc file you could use one of the free captioning/subtitle programs to export to another format and then go to http://www.theneitherworld.com/mcpoodle/SCC_TOOLS/DOCS/SCC_TOOLS.HTML
and get the tools listed there.

Pixeltools makes some products dealing with CC and also have a good run down on the various types of captioning here: http://www.pixeltools.com/tech_tip_closed_captioning.html

So really - aswesome to see it somewhat implimented.

You can also read up at http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/mag/resources/guides/mag_guide_vol5.html