Basics

Screen shots

Transcribe a video

Format script

Time stamp script

Demo software

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Captioning HD Video

Complete captioning and subtitling solution on a CD.

No additional hardware required. No generation loss!!!

Overview

Encoder versions

Present status of captioning HD tape

Captioning in Asian Languages for DTV Broadcasting

Overview
With CPC-700HD CaptionMaker (Windows) and MacCaption-HD (Mac), you can caption any HD (Mpeg-2) video sitting inside your computer without using any external closed caption encoder. 

To caption a video, you need the transcript of the video. There are many ways to transcribe a video. After obtaining the transcript, you will then import the script to the CPC software and format the script. Finally, you will listen to the video and synchronize the captions to the video by associating timecodes to each captions manually. For details, click here.

Once you have a time stamped text file, you can add captions to a HD video by a simple mouse click. Then you either

1. use print to tape function to dump the video to a HD tape via FireWire. The caption data is transferred to the appropriate location on the HD video.

2. Or, use your NLE HD-SDI hardware like Avid, Blackmagic, Decklink or AJA to dump the video on the HD tape. We are still working on this functionality for different HD tape formats one at time, and it is not complete yet. Please check the status to understand the difficulty of this process and the most up-to-date information.

Caption data sits in the VAUX Data area of a 720x480 DV video. On the other hand, caption data sits in Line 21 of NTSC (525 lines) video.  When you transfer the DV video to NTSC, you must use a deck which can transfer the caption data from the DV VAUX data area to the NTSC Line 21.

You can check out a few sample HD and SD Mpeg2 videos and watch the captions on your TV.

You may also download our Windows or Mac demo software and try it out yourself. The demo software has all the features of the licensed version with some limitations. To protect the software, we replace a few characters in each captions with "?" marks and limit the total number of captions to around 25.

Encoder version - Encoding only
The Encoder version is for encoding captions only. It does not have the capability to prepare time stamped caption file from raw script. It has the same look and feel as the DV version. See Feature Comparisons on the right hand side bar for details.

You can not prepare a time stamped caption files using the Encoder versions. You have to get a prepared time stamped caption file from a different source (e. g., CPC *.cap, DVD *.scc, Cheetah *.cap or *.asc etc.) and then use the Encoder versions to encode the captions on the video.

What else does the DV version do?
Beside captioning DV videos, you can also export files to caption

• DVD

• DV and NLE videos

• Webcast (post production)

• Live Captioning

For details, click on the item on the sidebar on the right.

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Status as of 12/13/2007

Our latest version of MacCaption-HD, which you can be download from the Downloads page, supports many currently existing MPEG2 and HD video formats. These new functions will be incorporated in CaptionMaker-HD very soon.

MPEG2 Elementary Streams and Program streams
Captions can be added to generic MPEG2 Elementary and Program streams. The MPEG2 can be SD or HD. Captions can be formatted in any one of the following styles: ATSC 608/708, DVD, CCube/LSI DVx 608 Linear or CCube/LSI DVx 608 Temporal.

Panasonic DVCPRO HD
Captions can be added to DVCPROHD. You need to use FireWire to send the captioned video to a compatible VTR such as a Panasonic AJ-HD1400.

SONY XDCAM
Captions can be added to XDCAM.

Panasonic DVCPROHD and Sony XDCAM captioning is a new feature for MacCaption and we are looking for end users to help us test this new capability.

Proofing your 708 captions
You can use MacCaption to proof your HD captions. We have a Print to FireWire function in the software that will generate and send an MPEG Transport Stream to a standard off the shelf HD TV. The TV will directly decode the HD captions so that you can verify your work. We use a SHARP AQUOS LC-26D7U TV for this purpose.

HD-SDI - the difficulties
So far we have not found a way of exporting a captioned HD video over HD-SDI. The problem with this transfer mechanism is that the third party hardware companies such as Avid, AJA, Blackmagic do not make any of the HD-SDI Vertical Ancillary data area other than that part which contains the active video available through a software API. To add captions to the Panasonic DVCPROHD video we actually create HD VANC captions and then translate them into the DVCPROHD format. So far no hardware manufacturer we have found exposes enough of the VANC data to us to add closed captions directly to it. It would be great if Avid, or any hardware manufacturer, provided this functionality in their software. 

We are very interested in working with you on captioning HD video materials. Let us know if you can make use of MacCaption's DVCPROHD captioning functionality or if you have any comments about HD captioning in general.

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Additional Info

Feature Comparison (Win)

Feature Comparison (Mac)

DVD caption & subtitle

Webcast captions in wmv, qt, rm & flash

Live captioning using an external encoder

Printable Brochures