Captioning DV Video

Complete captioning and subtitling solution on a CD.

No additional hardware required. No generation loss!!!

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Note: Final Cut Pro 7 uses a new workflow to caption DV video for output via Firewire. You can still use the same CPC software, but the export has changed. FCP7 users please see this video tutorial for more information.

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To caption a video, you need the transcript of the video. There are many ways to transcribe a video. After obtaining the transcript, you will then import the script to the CPC software and format the script. Finally, you will listen to the video and synchronize the captions to the video by associating timecode to each caption manually. For details, see the closed caption preparation page.

With CaptionMaker-DV (Windows) and MacCaption-DV (Mac), you can caption any DV video sitting inside your computer without using any external closed caption encoder.

Once you have a time stamped text file, you can add captions to a DV video by a simple mouse click. Then you use a print to tape function to dump the video to a tape (DV or BetaSP) via FireWire. The caption data is transferred to line 21 of NTSC video by most DV tape decks or digital to analog converters like the Sony DVMC-DA2.

Caption data sits in the VAUX Data area of a 720x480 DV video. On the other hand, caption data sits in Line 21 of NTSC (525 lines) video.  When you transfer the DV video to NTSC, you must use a deck which can transfer the caption data from the DV VAUX data area to the NTSC Line 21.

You can check out two sample 720x480 DV videos and see the captions on your TV.

You may also download our Windows or Mac demo software and try it out yourself. The demo software has all the features of the licensed version with some limitations. To protect the software, we replace a few characters in each captions with "?" marks and limit the total number of captions to around 25.

Encoder version - Encoding only

The Encoder version is for encoding captions only. It does not have the capability to prepare time stamped caption file from raw script. It has the same look and feel as the DV version. See Feature Comparisons on the right hand side bar for details.

You can not prepare a time stamped caption files using the Encoder versions. You have to get a prepared time stamped caption file from a different source (e. g., CPC *.cap, DVD *.scc, Cheetah *.cap or *.asc etc.) and then use the Encoder versions to encode the captions on the video.

What else does the DV version do?

Beside captioning DV videos, you can also export files to caption

• DVD
• Webcast (Post Production)
• Live Captioning

For details, click on the item on the sidebar on the right.

Other Options

DV video is a compressed video. If you are concerned about the quality of DV video and want to caption your uncompressed video directly inside your NLE system, you should get our NLE softweare. NLE version can caption in DV method too. If you want to caption your HD videos, then you should get the HD software. The HD version has all the features of the DV and NLE versions.