Captioning Tips

Do you like to watch movies? Can you type fairly quickly? Congratulations, you are now qualified as a video transcriptionist. And just in time, too, as there will be a gold rush soon for video transcription services. In October 2010, President Obama signed into law the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which mandates further captioning of video for the Web. The bill will apply to any video that was originally aired on TV. As more and more videos are uploaded to the web, the demand for video captioning services will grow at an exponential rate. Government agencies, schools, museums, and many other types of businesses will need the services of a good video transcriptionist. Your biggest problem may be keeping up with the demand. For about $150, you can start your own business from the comfort of your living room. Software would cost you less than $130, which would get you a copy of MovieCaptioner and an upgrade to QuickTime Pro. Now all you need is a web page (fr...

From time to time you may get an error in your SCC caption files. Here is a (hopefully) helpful strategy for zeroing in on the cause of the problem. Knowing that it is a bad file in the first place is simple. I try to open it in QuickTime Pro. To be able to do this, however, you need to download a free plugin from Apple for importing SCC files into QuickTime. It is called "ClosedCaptionImporter.component". It can be downloaded (currently) from this link: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/ClosedCaptionImporter/Introduction/Intro.html . Once you download it, just drop the plugin into your QuickTime folder in your hard drive's Library folder... If you have QuickTime 7 open, you'll need to close it to make the plugin available when you re-open it. Note that as of this writing, QuickTime 7 is necessary for all the features of QuickTime Pro to work. QuickTime X, the default QT Player that comes standard with Snow Leopard does not have all the function...