I’ve noticed that my local news has captioning running early. The captions will stop running and five minutes later, the news story will actually finish. Odd, really, because I would think it would run slower.
I’ve seen a lot of mistakes with closed captioning, but I can’t think of anything exact at the moment. Mostly, it’s just garbled transmissions, changing text colors (my local NBC affiliate is really bad for that sometimes), and changing words.
I love closed captioning, for the same reason I love subtitles. I can keep track of what I’m watching much better. What a shame my family hates it. I can only keep it turned on the television in my bedroom. It’s forbidden everywhere else since the time we lost the remote and couldn’t turn off captioning for a month.
jessica
About ten years ago I visited the local NBC affiliate to interview a reporter there about journalism for a class assignment. While I was there, I got a chance to ask how the captioning of the local news program was done, and actually met the person responsible for doing it.
I found out that the text that was put into the closed captioning equipment to broadcast their encoded signal is the same text used to tell the anchors what to say. In other words, the text feed in the Teleprompter and the closed captioning were one and the same. I’m not sure exactly how the speed is managed, but I have heard that it can be manually controlled.
This explained the reason why I saw a lot of strange coding, such as “Gary does sports” and “Snd Bite :15” (fifteen seconds of somebody talking on tape). I would also often see directions to the anchors, as well as pronunciation guides to help the anchors speak unusual names.
There was even an in-joke that I caught once. One of the weathermen on the local CBS affiliate is a man who has extremely youthful looks. He looks like he’s 14 years old and never needed a shave in his life. It became a joke among me and my family to refer to the guy as “Doogie”, after the Doogie Howser character. Once several years ago (when the guy looked practically prepubescent) I saw during a news broadcast the captioning say, “Doogie does Weather”, and I almost died laughing, now realizing that apparently they had the same nickname for the guy.
I once turned closed captioning on while watching The Dukes of Hazzard. Funniest damned thing to read on your screen. They actually spelled out Rosco’s laugh. And it’s just hilarious to see “possum on a gumbush” as well as some other sayings in writing. Too funny.
Oh. Wow. Always nice to know.
I’ve seen some of the stupid comments like “hey, lots of sports tonight!” captioned too, so maybe they could type that in extra. Unless those comments were supposed to be there. Hmm.
jessica
Is this because of the color (image) of the curtains on the video stream?
Or do you mean that the curtains themselves secretly send out some kind of radio signal that is picked up by all local video equipment, which only affects the CC portion of the video signal?
