Introduction
If you are in streaming media industry then may be you are aware of What Is A Caption.
Because it is very important part of video industry. In some countries govt. have done it mandatory for every video content which is consumed online as well as for broadcasters too.
So today we will discuss about what exactly Captioning is ? what are type of caption ? and how does caption works ?
What Is A Caption ?
Captions are time synchronized texts with audio track for a Video File.
In Other Words,
Captions are the texts based representation of speech and sounds in a video. These are the white texts on black background.
All the words which are speaking in the video are shown as text on the video. It covers the special sounds like Hahaha and dog barking too.Captions are displayed lower center portion of video.
Captions are very useful for the people having hearing loss. They can easily read the texts and can understand the whole video with special words.
It is not only useful for the people having hearing loss but for public places too. Because at the public place there is lot of crowed so that people can understand the video by reading the captions easily.
Captions are available in one or two languages only.
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Types Of Caption ?
(1) Open Captions
Open Captions are the type of captions that are permanently available in the video. We can can not hide them during playing a video.
Open Captions are not that much popular because it did not give us freedom to hide it. Although these captions are helpful for hearing loss people but it can be uncomfortable for normal people from video.
So same content can not be used for both kind of people.
Open Caption Content can be helpful for you if you are uploading your content on different platforms. Because at time you need not to provide individual captions for the video.
(2) Closed Captions
Closed Captions are kind of captions which can be hide while playing a video. Closed Captions are embedded in video individually.
The best example of closed captioning is Youtube. You can see in youtube video in right bottom side you can make ON Closed Caption and OFF Closed Caption.
So Closed Caption Content can be useful for normal people as well as people having hearing loss.
Closed Captions are very famous than the Open Captions due its wider use case.
How Does Closed Captioning Work ?
(1) Real Time Captioning
Real Time Captioning is done in LIVE Broadcasts of programs. Because there is need for quick captioning in short period of time. But it is slower than then offline content captioning.
You can do it by using the ASR auto software for automatic process. But here is the high error ratio.
Otherwise you can go for short hand steno. Which hear the event audio and type in the software quickly to broadcast the captions in small period of time. It is more efficient than ASR auto software. We have described briefly about this software below in this article.
(2) Offline Captioning
If you are having content offline have enough time to embed captions. Then go for it because it is highly efficient.
For Example,
If you are having a video file and wants to embed the Closed Captions in it. Then first you need to make its transcript file format for video.
The transcript file contains on the texts which are spoken in the video only as it is. It do not content any kind of coding. So it is simple text conversion of spoken words.
Now there are two file formats which are used widely for any caption file. We need to convert our transcript file into anyone of these two fromats.
(a) SRT
SRT stands for SubRip Subtitle. This caption format is very easy and very famous too. It is supported by various online players. It contains Time Codes , Frame Number & Text Line.
Example of SRT Format is shown above in the Text file.
(b) SCC
SCC stands for Scenarist Closed Caption. It is a bit complex format. Letters , Numbers and hex codes are used in it. You can also use converters to make this format easily.
Now encoding is the final process to embed your captions with the video. So this encoded output will provide you captions as per you described in formats.
What Is ASR ?
ASR Stands for Automated Speech Reorganization Software. This software tool is used to convert the audio into text of a video file. It is done very quickly. It saves lot of time and efforts.
These kind of software are used in LIVE TV.
But still the main drawback is that its accuracy is not greater than 90%. Which results it can not understand the words and gives totally wrong output. It is still very hard to understand by these kind of software.
But still it saves your lot of time and you can check the text after conversion. Then correct the words which are not suited well.
Conclusion Of Captions
Caption is a very useful function to represent the text of spoken words in video. Even closed caption also facilitate us to hide or show the captions in between the video.
The Google Search Crawlers or Robots crawl the videos according to its title, description and its tags. If every video is having its closed caption file individually then it will be very easy for google to track the right video with right keywords for what people are searching.
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