Exclusive “Premium Roll-up” Style Captioning Compliments Traditional “Basic Roll-up” and “Pop-on” Style Captioning
Stanfordville, NY – Video Caption Corporation, the leading source for offline captioning and subtitling services, offers the industry’s most comprehensive range of English and Spanish closed captioning services for all types of video programming.
According to company President, Justin K. Macedonia, “Our closed captioning is done in-house from start to finish – from transcription to encoding – so we can offer our clients fast turnarounds, strict quality control and extremely competitive prices.” He adds that Video Caption Corporation is able to guarantee fast turnarounds. “There is no need to schedule captioning weeks in advance. Using state-of-the-art non-linear workstations, we can assign multiple caption editors to work on the same program simultaneously, providing clients with the fastest turnarounds and highest quality in the industry.”
On the production front, one development worth noting is the generation of closed captioning for integration with nonlinear editing (NLE) systems. While this process isn’t applicable to all NLE systems, it has proven an efficient and cost-effective workflow method for a growing number of video producers.
“With NLE captioning, you can eliminate the need to ship tape between locations – a savings in both time and money,” continues Macedonia. “Instead, producers forward their video to caption providers as small digital reference files (typically posted to an FTP site). The provider uses these reference files to caption the video and outputs video files containing only the closed caption data. These video files are sent to the producer typically via email and are imported into the NLE. When the final video is output to tape, it contains all of the closed caption data.”
He also points out that Video Caption Corporation’s captioning has been evaluated by the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP), and that the company has been approved as a vendor for the DCMP’s Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education.* The DCMP is the only organization which evaluates the quality of captions produced in the United States, and fewer than 10% of the companies offering closed captioning services have met their strict standards.
Captioning Styles
Traditionally, the industry has offered two captioning styles: roll-up, which features a block of two to four lines of text that “roll up” one line at a time; and pop-on, which provides speaker identification through screen placement and includes descriptions of music and sound effects. Adds Macedonia, “At Video Caption Corporation, we saw the need for a captioning style that bridged the gap in terms of user experience and price point. Our Premium Roll-up Style satisfies that requirement.”
Video Caption Corporation offers three distinct captioning styles:
Basic Roll-up. Video Caption Corporation’s Basic Roll-up Captions are accurately transcribed, carefully timed, and free of typos. The company’s experienced caption editors diligently research all unfamiliar terms for proper spelling, and apply the same stringent, multiple-level quality control reviews as they do to other caption styles. In addition, the captions are moved as necessary, so that they never cover onscreen graphics.
Premium Roll-up. The company’s exclusive, Premium Roll-up Captions, take roll-up style captions to the next level. In addition to the high quality features of Basic Roll-up, Premium Roll-up captions include a number of features that significantly increase overall readability. For example, when captions are moved to avoid covering onscreen graphics, company caption editors do not simply relocate the three-line block of text as they would with Basic Roll-up. Rather, they anticipate the move by taking the text off the screen at the end of the sentence immediately prior to the graphic, and then begin the next sentence with the text in the new location. When consistent with the audio, the editors also time the text to come off the screen at the end of a scene and begin again at the start of the next scene. While this feature is common with high-quality pop-on style captions, it is virtually unheard of with roll-up.
Pop-on. Studies have consistently shown that pop-on style captions are preferred by deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Video Caption Corporation’s Pop-on Captions are carefully placed on the screen to indicate the speaker, and include descriptions of music and sound effects. They are the ideal choice for programming where there are multiple characters onscreen simultaneously.
For more information about Video Caption Corporation’s video captioning and other services for the government sector, please call 800-705-1203 or visit www.vicaps.com.
Since 1997, Video Caption Corporation (www.vicaps.com) has provided high quality English and Spanish offline closed captioning and multi-language subtitling for video and DVDs. The company also captions and subtitles video for streaming media, and provides video format conversion, duplication, and related services.
* This does not infer an endorsement by the Department of Education.