a) How does real time closed captioning work? Did this give way to software which can type as you speak, or vice versa? b) How was closed captioning done before real time? Was it typed out by someone like a stenographer?
“They’re coming to take me away ha-ha, ho-ho, hee-hee, to the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time… :)” - Napoleon IV
Closed captioning works like this:
– In scripted shows that are presented either live or by tape delay, like news or other rigidly scripted programs, the on-air talent read from a TelePrompter, not from the paper scripts thay have on the desk. The TelePrompter output not only goes to a display that the talent can see, but also to a CC encoder, which inserts the CC information in the vertical blanking interval (VBL) of the TV signal, and can be decoded by your TV if equipped, and if you turn on the option.
– In pretaped shows with live (unscripted) content, like daytime talk shows, somebody types up the dialogue after the tape is edited, and syncs this info with the tape.
– In a minority of live shows with unscripted content, there are people who use special entry equipment to type in real time along with the dialogue. If you see shows like this, you may notice that, when the dialogue gets quick, or when people talk over each other, the CC may not be able to keep up.
A committee is a lifeform with six or more legs and no brain.
Its inserted on line 22 of the tv.
Real time is typed in by really really fast typists with special keyboards. Thus, sometimes they type ‘eye deal’ for ‘ideal’
Film scripts are inputted on videos that are captioned.
There are a lot of caption comp’s. YOu can do it yourself with your PC with a caption card.
The big one is the National Captioning Institute.
Takes 40 hours to caption one hour of tv, etc.
One thing I’ve noticed is that movies on broadcast channels will have words “bleeped” but the CC is the original. One movie in particular had the F word on CC many times during the broadcast over a network affiliate. I guess someone forgot about the CC, or else it was too hard to change.
I use CC quite often because I find the sounds on many programs annoying but the pictures are good. Plus I can make up my own storyline if there’s no CC.
40 hours to caption a show? Not the way we do it… 
But then, we don’t sync it exactly with the shot changes, etc, either…so…
Real time captioning is done with a steno keyboard and the captionist has a dictionary with all of the keystrokes in there so it’ll translate into English. If she doesn’t have a word in her dictionary, it’ll translate wrong, i.e. “eye deal” instead of “ideal”: if she doesn’t have the two strokes in the dictionary to come up as “ideal,” it’ll translate those two strokes separately-- eye and deal. (“stroke” is what they call it when you hit a phrase on the steno keyboard. “ideal” would be a two-stroke word… AOEU/TKAOEL. AOEU being “long I sound” and TKAOEL being “deal”) I hope this makes some sense…
Taped shows are transcribed, the transcript is chopped up into readable blocks of text, then the blocks are time stamped to pop up at the appropriate time.
bye for now,
A Girl
I sometimes watch CC when I can’t hear all the words clearly. I’ve seen some interesting things.
Sometimes the CC will paraphrase the script, shortening long sentences into brief statements. This happened a lot watching “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome”. Sometimes the CC will be totally different than the vocals for a scene. I’ve noticed it a few times on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One episode in particular there was three lines bantied between two characters on the sound, but the CC had a running dialogue and five times the amount of words spoken. ???
Real time CC is often more difficult to keep up. Try watching the local news - it screws up all the time.
But I do like it when watching rock groups play on TV - helps decypher those mysterious lyrics.
I like to use my CC when my kids are in bed. It’s easier to keep up with the shows sometimes if I can read what they’re saying. I also agree with Irishman… it works great for song lyrics.
That John Denver’s full of shit man!
A girl? Sounds like you know more than I do. I got my info a long time back. Being deaf, it made it the thing to look into.
I did cover some of this before on the board. Especially BLEEP which was on subject I brought up & the question was why they used ‘Bleep’ & it turned out cause that’s what the captioner heard.
My closed captions are awful. As I’ve complained before you couldn’t never get the jist of a program just using them. It is horribly distorted.
Also the news appears just to be the broadcast of the teleprompter. Here in Chgo most stations don’t even run captioning when the reporters go live
Thats right Markxxx. That really is a drag when you watch the news which is captioned from that teleprompter & they start on something live & then there aren’t any captions.
Also they often print teleprompter crap like ‘ad lib’ ‘roll’ etc.