Just a quick to say that I really liked your answer. Closed Captining is now being used for more than just helping hearing-imparied individuals. THE TONIGHT SHOW is using the CC2 function to close caption their broadcast in Spanish for those who speak spanish. And the Spanish language network TELEMUNDO captions some of its programs into English for those of us who should have but didn’t take Spanish in School. Makes watching those Spanish telenovelas a lot more interesting.
The answer there wasn’t really complete. Closed captioning for some live shows is not entered in real-time. When I was in high school, I worked at a local TV station and one of my first duties was to operate the teleprompter during the newscasts. At that station, the script information that was entered for the teleprompter was also sent out over the air as the closed captioning information. So, whatever was in the script is what viewers would see in the captions. If there was an error in the script, there was an errror in the captions. If the newscast deviated from the script, the captions would be completely wrong (or absent).
I’d like to point out that voice recognition software is no longer “notoriously unreliable.”
Here at The University of Montana we deliver class content live and in real time to students with hearing impairments using Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software. It ain’t perfect but it is very, very good.
Yes and around here in Phoenix, Arizona these are the most common type of “live captioning” for news shows. And let me tell you - this is a cheap and crappy shot at providing “live” captioning. Oftentimes, the reporters do not follow the scripts and the captioning just goes dead at on-the-scene reporting. This kind of captioning should be banned since these studios can obviously afford the better kind (a real person).
I am sorry - you are wrong here. It is very, very good ONLY when you train it. Current voice recognition systems require training for hours to get the accuracy up to very good. How would these voice recognition systems perform when a perfect stranger is talking? Very badly. In your situation - class content delievered to hearing impaired students - that is ideal because the system is trained to the teacher’s voice and thus can deliver impeccable captioning. But bring a total stranger to the system and all you will get is gobbleydegook.
Another advantage to close captioning is that it greatly aids in hearing song lyrics BUT, very oddly, this can also lead to some very strange errors.
In the movie “Bulworth” (both Warren Beatty’s and Halle Berry’s best movie ever, in my opinion) there is a scene in which W.B. is dancing with H.B. in an afterhours club and part of the lyrics go:
"Look at that girl over there.
“The one with the weave all in her hair.”
The close captioning, however, says:
"Look at that girl over there.
“The one with the weevil in her hair.”
A weevil in her hair??! And this is on the video where, one assumes, there was ample opportunity to check for errors before releasing the tape to the buying public.
Considering our nation’s 19th century history regarding African-Americans and cotton fields, I’ve often wondered what meaning today’s hearing impaired gave that odd lyric.
As another note on the “delayed response” of closed captioning, I note that the Miami ABC affiliate, WPLG, seems (hey, they flash this stuff quick) to use a service out of Denver, Co. This also might account for some of the misspellings: The stenographer might not be familiar with local names and variant spellings. I’ll try to remember to follow up on this…I just emailed them, and I’ll summarize the reply.
No special meaning - just that hearing people can’t spell.
I liked the article also but I take issue with the author saying that most of today’s programs are captioned on TV. This is not true. Out of my 300+ channels on my satellite TV only the 4 or 5 major networks regularily caption their shows. As for the other 295 channels, it is a roll of the dice which mostly turns out no captions. To make things worse, my newfangled high definition digital TV shows no captions for 4 of the 5 high definiton channels I subscribe to. HBOHD is the ONLY one with captions. (I know Showtime HD has captions also but I don’t subscribe to that lame channel). The others (ESPNHD, DiscoveryHD, etc) have no captions whatsoever, ever. And as for off-the-air High Definiton programs, even the major networks suffer from major caption suckage. Fox is the worst of them all with captions being completely garbled and massively delayed (I am not talking about live captioning here). Welcome to high technology.
I also worked at a small television station where we did live news shows 4 times a day. Closed captioning was run directly off our teleprompters. Basically the CC system showed only what was typed in as the script and changed when the anchors hit the foot pedal to scroll up the prompter (we didn’t even have a teleprompter operator). It’s biggest problem was that you would see some very interesting stuff like cue points for where tape would start and you would only see the outcues rather than the script during sound on tape interviews. This also accounted for many of the mistakes people would complain about because the script often had phonetic spellings for hard to pronounce names and things of that nature.
I know people are thinking that’s a stupid way to do things but in big money only gets spent in big tv and we certainly didn’t qualify for that arena. In fact a court trained stenographer makes between $12-13/hour and that’s twice what I was making per hour as a director.
In my area (Phoenix, Az) I am talking about a major news channel (KPNX) with a huge budget and guess what - they still do captions off the teleprompter. My biggest complaint about this is that all live material (reporters at the scene, etc) that accounts for more than half the show, results in no captioning at all. Good example - when the planes crashed into the world trade centers on 9/11 - how much info did I get? Very little. Its an uphill battle… 
A small correction. The agency now known as NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) used to be called the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). Along with the U.S. Naval Observatory, they have been responsible for keeping accurate time for the United States.
A word about News and CC
I’ve been studying closed captions for a year or so now in order to try to get them onto my homemade TV recordings, and let me tell you, while there are a ton of utilities out there to add subtitles to your homemade DVDs or Video CDs, there are virtually no tools for closed captioning.
Reportedly, even those still-pretty-expensive home DVD recorders (that you hook up like a VCR, rather than having to capture the video into your computer so you can burn the DVD there) don’t record closed captions. If it wasn’t for the tireless efforts of another individual who decoded all the caption data and wrote perl scripts for converting them to useful formats, I would’ve been totally out of luck.
Anyway, on the subject of captioning humor, I’d also like to point out a humorous captioning error I saw, on the DVD of the movie Fight Club.
As Brad Pitt’s character is burning Edward Norton’s character’s hand with lye, Norton, trying to utilize a meditation technique he learned earlier in the movie, gasps “I’m going to my cave. I’m going to my cave, and I’m going to find my power animal.” The captioneer apparently didn’t pay too much attention to the earlier part of the movie, because the captions read “I’m going to my cave. I’m going to my cave, and I’m going to find my Valium.”
I suppose that would take your mind off the pain much more effectively than a power animal…
Good discussion. I’m one of those who depends on CC. It seems like many shows are captioned off of the scripts, so if an actor flubs a line or ad libs, it doesn’t always match. On Star Trek, for example, “stardates” and other made-up numbers or feldergarb are frequently off. But my favorite was on an episode of JAG, when mention was made of “Shakespeare’s Porsche” which flummoxed me. Until later in the show, when another Shakespearean comment was made about the play “Merchant of Venice,” in which the heroine in named Portia.
Word Surfing TV
Lots of good info here for someone who’s been looking into the subject out of desperate need.
A couple of points.
Point 1: CC garbage. I’ve been trying to track down the source of persistant garbage on one major channel now for six months. The channel is AMC and for a while, I thought it was entirely AMC’s fault, but it
appears, now, not to be the case. My best guess now is that the Gibberanto I see on AMC captioning is due to line noise in the cable feed to my house here in Salem, OR. The other houses (of friends) in the area
(and it turns out, in Reno, Nevada, a couple of houses on the coast and in Eugene, OR) apparently have older cabling and there’s probably line noise causing the problem.
Point 2: Thanks for the word on DVD recorders. I had been planning on going to DVD for recording soon but see no point to it now.
Point 3: My biggest gripe is that quite a few DVD releases of cable channel programs (such as ones from The History Channel), while CC’d for broadcast (at least, I’ve seen them CC’d) are NOT CC’d on the DVD. ARRRGGHH.
Point 4: DVD releases are not always correctly marked with CC’ing. Most simply are a case of the CC’ing being listed as present on the box (and noticably absent from the DVD), but in one case, one of the releases of Army of Darkness, had it listed as being present and even had the CC’ing listed in the “Set-Up”
Options as being available, but was actually only CC’d in Esperanto. Esperanto? Somebody, somewhere, gave me a good but slightly bitter laugh with that one.
Final Point 4 (and a plea for some sort of explanation): A fair number of movies that I’ve seen on TV with CC’ing show up sometimes on other channels without CC’ing. Why does that happen? Cripes, you’d think that once done, it would stick Or did someone at the channel forget to switch it on? Fox is
particularly prone to this for some reason.
Browning>>>
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, T G, glad to have you with us.
Well if you are looking for free tools - there probably aren’t any.
The problem is that the way closed captioning works is that they encode data into line 21 of the video signal. Line 21 is NOT part of the visible picture - tools written to manipulate video data usually do only for the visible picture. You need professional (read $$$) tools to manipulate the other parts of the video signal. Many professional DVD authoring tools encode line-21 data as well as data for other lines (content rating, etc). Decoding line-21 data on the other hand is easily freely available because the Microsoft DirectShow API has these decoding functions built in and many tools take advantage of this.
I also get CC garbage (particularily on FOX) - but this is on the HIGH-DEFINITION DIGITAL channel. Noise excuse can not apply here (with digital you either get a perfect picture or you get nothing).
There’s a reason for this - see answer to your last point.
I haven’t seen one of these DVD’s myself but CC’s and subtitles are not the same thing. Subtitles are separate streams of overlay images interleaved with the video stream, and CC’s are data on line 21 of the video stream. For a DVD to say it has CC but actually only has subtitles is simply lying (or the person making the DVD doesn’t know the difference).
Ok there is a simple explanation for this - when a studio decides to caption a video, the studio goes to a captioning agency and makes a deal with them to caption this video for showing on a certain air date. This means if the video is sold to another station - that statio must enter into a new agreement with the caption studio to recaption the film (or at least get permission to air the original captions). Ditto for transferring to DVD, VHS, etc. Of course many of those networks are too indifferent about making sure their shows are captioned - after all they are meeting the 25% required by the FCC so why should they spend money to caption more?
For those of you thinking of going all the way to high definiton, read this:
The way the high definition standard works - I am talking about when you use the actual high resolution component video (Y, Cr, Cb) input, the source is responsible for injecting captioning onto the video stream. One of my high definition sources is a nice progressive scan DVD player. Unfortunately there is NO WAY to get captioning to show up. I am talking about real line-21 CC, and not subtitles. The DVD player does not have any line-21 decoder built in, and my HDTV set expects the source (the DVD player in this case) to do the captioning. So what do I get? Nothing. I have one DVD which has CC but no subtitles (John Q) and I cannot watch it because there is no way to make the CC show up. What monkeys came up with this?
Along a similar thread - I spent some time looking at the quality of caption text when purchasing my HDTV set. I found one which had really nice text. But SLAP gad dang it - the source is responsible for the CC. So when I plugged in my HDTV receiver to my HDTV set I was supremely puzzled as to why the text looked different and not as good… then I discovered it was the receiver doing the caption display, NOT the TV… Arrrrrrrrgh… and of course “they” don’t make any active effort tell the consumer about this. So I am stuck with the ugly slowly painted on captioning provided by my HDTV receiver.