Critical Mass Productions

Last week, the FCC adopted rules governing the closed captioning requirements for online video as mandated by 2010′s “Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (“CVAA”).” Here’s the executive summary of what this may mean for our captioning clients.

1) FCC 12-9, III, A, 3, 37: “We will require VPOs (Video Programming Owners) to provide VPDs (Video Programming Distributors) with captions of at least the same quality as the television captions provided for that programming…  In evaluating whether the captions are of at least the same quality, the Commission will consider such factors as completeness, placement, accuracy, and timing. ”

BUT: ” we will not hold VPDs or VPOs responsible for quality issues outside of their control such as broadband connection speeds or the constraints of a particular apparatus. ”

As of this writing, YouTube has no mechanism to adjust placement on the left or right of screen, so content owners should be aware of this limitation. (More on this in a minute.) It could be that the commission will not hold VPO’s liable for YouTube’s lack of functionality in this area.

Additionally, note that the standard of comparison is the original, as-broadcast captioning. A broadcaster could reasonably conclude that the safest course of action will be to “dumb-down” the broadcast captioning to match the internet constraints.

2) FCC 12-9, III, A, 4, 41: Basically, if it has aired on television in the USA, it must be captioned when put on the internet.

3) FCC 12-9, III, A, 4, 44: Programming is subject to the ruling and must be captioned if it is presented on the internet “substantially in its entirety” such as a complete movie or an episode of a TV show. In paragraph 48, they emphasize that “video clips” may at a later time be covered under these rules. “Outtakes” qualify as exempt at this time.

4) FCC 12-9, IV, C, 112: Essentially, the internet captioning “experience” must replicate the CEA-708 television experience, so existing implementations (like YouTube) must be expanded to include color, font, transparency and positioning controls similar to the TV standard. This has not yet happened, so it remains to be seen how this will play out. Rest assured that we’ll continue working with YouTube and other distributors to work out the technical details for our clients.

Deadlines for compliance for content owners:

• 6 months: Prerecorded programming that is not edited for Internet distribution.
• 12 months: Live and near live programming that was recorded within 24 hours of broadcast on television.
• 18 months: Prerecorded programming that is edited for Internet distribution.
• 24 months: Archival programming

Hardware devices (including BluRay) must be compliant on 1/1/2014.

So, bottom line: If you run your show on television with captioning, even locally, and then put it online, you’ll likely fall under the requirements of this ruling. As always, please feel free to call Don at 405-842-3343 if we can help you sort any of this out.

We recently shot an entire sporting event with our Red ONE camera – overcranked. That will be great when we need to show the cowboys hitting the dirt in slow motion, but we needed a way to create a DVD for viewing that ran at normal speed (in this case, double slo-mo = normal speed).

After poking around in the edit software without an easy answer, I came up with the following solution. I edited all the slo-mo clips into my Avid timeline and exported a same-as-source Quicktime movie. Then I used some free software from Apple called “Dumpster” to trick the computer into playing it back double-time.

Here’s a pic of the settings:

You just need to divide the duration number by two and set the timescale to double… in my case, I went from 29970 to 59940.

Since Apple’s Compressor takes these numbers at face value, it created the Mpeg2 for the DVD at double-speed, which was exactly what we needed for the viewing copy.

We recently started embedding subtitles in m4v files destined for iPods, iPhones, etc. and have learned a few things along the way that I thought I would share here, especially since subtitling and closed captioning documentation for Apple devices seems to be hard to come by.

1) The software we use to embed the subtitles into the m4v files wants a SubRip file (.srt) that includes a number for each caption. For example:

1

00:00:00,000 –> 00:00:03,125

2

00:00:03,125 –> 00:00:04,625

And so on. Without the numbering, the embedding will fail.

2) When checking the embedded movie in Quicktime player on a computer, only 2 attribute tags render correctly. The <i> italic code and the <u> underline codes work, but the bold and font color tags seem to be ignored. We will check these on the iPad to see if they display properly there, but I’m betting they won’t. My assumption is that at this time Apple is supporting a subset of the expanded SRT spec that VLC uses.

Our upstairs neighbor Sean just pointed me to a relatively-new music service that I’m excited to share with our clients: Jamendo, launched in 2009, claims to be “the world’s #1 website for free and legal music downloads under Creative Commons licenses.” With over 10,000 tracks from 4,500 artists as of this post, you just might find the perfect track for your next project.

Their annual rates range from $23 for a corporate video or internet use on up to $60 for a regional spot or $180 for a national spot. As a point of comparison, the track that Phuel Marketing licensed from Tenth Avenue North for a recent spot we lensed and cut cost considerably more than $60! Of course, you’ve never heard of any of the artists at Jamendo, but if budget is a concern it certainly is worth at least a glance.

We’re becoming familiar with the library, so don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like some help finding the perfect track for your next project.

This has been coming up more often as an increasing number of our clients are taking advantage of the enhanced SEO possibilities of adding captioning to YouTube videos, not to mention the access to millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers, so I thought I would do a quick tutorial on the process. We do the heavy lifting, but each YouTube channel owner must attach the captioning files that we provide – we do not have access to your account to do these steps.

Step 1: Make sure you know where your text file containing the captions is – this will end in the three letter extension “SRT”

Step 2: Log into your account, click your user name at the top of the screen, and then the “Videos” link.

Step 3: Find the video to which you’d like to attach closed-captioning, and click the “Edit Info” button.

Step 4: Click the “Captions and Subtitles” link.

Step 5: Click the “Add New Captions or Transcript” button and upload your SRT file.

It sounds harder than it is, so please give it a try and don’t hesitate to call us at 405-842-3343 ext. 105 if we can help in any way. Have fun and good captioning!

A cheat-sheet for uploading HD spots to Tulsa TV stations. Please comment if you have corrections.

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In parts 1 & 2, I listed digital delivery specs for SD in OKC & Tulsa. This is the OKC version in High Definition. Your comments are welcome!

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In part 1, I took a look at the live captioning launch. Now that the code has been released, I thought I would post again.

As written, the Google App Engine gadget requires the CART provider to have an account with StreamText (at 9¢ per minute) which will then pass the text to the gadget. This is changeable if you’d like to use another service. The natural next step would be for CART software to output directly to the gadget.

The gadget is written in Python, as you would expect. The stream.py code includes a hook for backspace characters, which I saw demonstrated during the I/O launch, so the realtime captioner may fix any mistakes and they’ll be updated. There’s a lot of code relating to translating the input, so that seems to be a real focus for the developers. There is support for different speaker IDs, too, another thing I saw happening in the I/O debut.

The streamtext.py code documents an intention to fetch only current captions, which means it should be possible to fetch back to the beginning if that’s what you wanted to do. That’s one thing that I noticed during I/O – when I jumped into a video already in progress, I could scroll back in the text only as far as the point at which I entered the stream.

There are 4 css and 3 javascript includes in the gadget. The all.css file includes code for the text and box colors, so if you’d rather not use the orange they used for I/O, you could change the following line:

h2 a {
color:#E63638;
}

The all.css file also includes the iframe dimensions of the text box (top:676px; left:50px;), container and wrapper, which could presumably be changed to your own taste.

I don’t have an account with StreamText, so I haven’t tested this in a production environment, but it certainly looks like a good start. You can view the I/O conference video on this topic here.

Now that nearly every local station can accept digital delivery for spot dubs, we thought it would be great to have a quick reference point. This is a work-in-progress and will be updated often. Please comment if you have corrections.

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