Closed captioning
Closed captions are typically used as a transcription of the audio portion of a program as it occurs (either verbatim or in edited form), sometimes including descriptions of non-speech elements.
On the other hand, the terms open, burned-in, baked on, hard-coded, or simply hard indicate that the captions are visible to all viewers as they are embedded in the video.
Subtitles assume the viewer can hear but cannot understand the language or accent, or the speech is not entirely clear, so they transcribe only dialogue and some on-screen text.
The term subtitle has been replaced with caption in a number of markets—such as Australia and New Zealand—that purchase large amounts of imported US material, with much of that video having had the US CC logo already superimposed over the start of it.
In New Zealand, broadcasters superimpose an ear logo with a line through it that represents subtitles for the hard of hearing, even though they are currently referred to as captions.
At the same time in the UK the BBC was demonstrating its Ceefax text based broadcast service which they were already using as a foundation to the development of a closed caption production system.
BBC Sport broadcasts use a "respeaker": a trained human who repeats the running commentary (with careful enunciation and some simplification and markup) for input to the automated text generation system.
The first programs seen with captioning were a Disney's Wonderful World presentation of the film Son of Flubber on NBC, an ABC Sunday Night Movie airing of Semi-Tough, and Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.
This Act required all analog television receivers with screens of at least 13 inches or greater, either sold or manufactured, to have the ability to display closed captioning by July 1, 1993.
Title III of the ADA requires that public facilities—such as hospitals, bars, shopping centers and museums (but not movie theaters)—provide access to verbal information on televisions, films and slide shows.
[11] A similar bill, S. 3304, with the same name, was passed by the United States Senate on August 5, 2010 and by the House of Representatives on September 28, 2010, and was signed by President Barack Obama on October 8, 2010.
[12] On February 20, 2014, the FCC unanimously approved the implementation of quality standards for closed captioning,[13] addressing accuracy, timing, completeness, and placement.
The law regarding this was proposed by Gerald Anthony Gullas Jr., a lawmaker from Cebu City, who had implemented the regulations on standardizing both official languages of the Philippines, as the people had not mastered English vocabulary.
[19][20][21] In 1981, TVNZ held a telethon to raise funds for Teletext-encoding equipment used for the creation and editing of text-based broadcast services for the deaf.
[22] Closed captions are also used in public environments, such as bars and restaurants, where patrons may not be able to hear over the background noise, or where multiple televisions are displaying different programs.
When a video is truly and accurately transcribed, then the closed-captioning publication serves a useful purpose, and the content is available for search engines to index and make available to users on the Internet.
[27] Automatic computer speech recognition works well when trained to recognize a single voice, and so since 2003, the BBC does live subtitling by having someone re-speak what is being broadcast.
For all types of NTSC programming, captions are encoded into line 21 of the vertical blanking interval – a part of the TV picture that sits just above the visible portion and is usually unseen.
Many viewers find that when they acquire a digital television or set-top box they are unable to view closed caption (CC) information, even though the broadcaster is sending it and the TV is able to display it.
Blu-ray media typically cannot carry any VBI data such as Line 21 closed captioning due to the design of DVI-based High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) specifications that was only extended for synchronized digital audio replacing older analog standards, such as VGA, S-Video, component video, and SCART.
It is a combination of a laser projector which places the captioning (words, sounds) anywhere on the screen and a thin playback device with a CD that holds many languages.
Through SMPTE, standards now exist that dictate how open and closed captions, as well as hearing-impaired and visually impaired narrative audio, are packaged with the rest of the digital movie.
Captioning systems have also been adopted by most major league and high-profile college stadiums and arenas, typically through dedicated portions of their main scoreboards or as part of balcony fascia LED boards.
Kimball designed the Dynamic Closed Captioning system,[citation needed] writes articles and speaks at developer conferences.
This is the preferred method for most US broadcast and cable networks that are mandated by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to provide captioned on-demand content.
Some online video conferencing services, such as Google Meet, offer the ability to display captions in real time of the current conversation.
[citation needed] US patent 7,009,657 describes a "method and system for the automatic collection and conditioning of closed caption text originating from multiple geographic locations" as used by news monitoring services.
TV-like CEA-608 closed captioning can now be displayed as an overlay when played back in the Preview and Trimmer windows, making it easy to check placement, edits, and timing of CC information.
In mid-2009, Apple released Final Cut Pro version 7 and began support for inserting closed caption data into SD and HD tape masters via FireWire and compatible video capture cards.
Video files on the editing timeline must be composited with a line-21 VBI graphic layer known in the industry as a "blackmovie" with closed caption data.
