Re: [Avid-L2] Captioning

Captioned or closed captioned?

The price CAN actually be about the same, but if you want straight captioning that could be more expensive.

Closed captioning (for the deaf, basically) has fallen pretty dramatically in price since the early days. Closed captioning (which uses the little decoder built into every new consumer TV set now) can be output as "open" captioning (where it is burned onto the visual part of the image for ALL to see, but the look is the same as closed captioning. If this is something like "foreign language" subtitling, then you may want something that looks a little prettier, and that could cost more.

There are basically three different costs to doing closed captioning through a service. The first is transcribing the entire show, or providing a word-for-word accurate script. If you have that, then the cost is significantly reduced because that is often the most expensive part of the process. The next part is to encode the text and sync it with the video/audio. That process creates a file which can be fed into a machine that actually "burns" the closed captioning (or open captioning) to the tape. The file has all of the words that are said PLUS the exact timecode when they were spoken.

So, if you have a script or transcription, then the third process doesn't cost too much more than a dub. So it depends on what you're dubbing TO. Obviously an HDCAMSR dub will cost more than a BetaSP dub. Maybe add $100 to the cost of the dub to add CC. You have to add the CC to a NEW tape (it can't be added to the original master) so add the tape costs. The middle process of doing the encoding is going to be about $6 to $10 per minute. So, in the case of a 2 hour doc, that's about $1200, plus the "dub," plus the transcription, if you don't have it. I've seen transcription costs of about $5 a finished minute on the web, so that's another $600. so maybe around $2,000-$2500 total?

Steve Hullfish
contributor: www.provideocoalition.com
author: "The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction"

On Jan 20, 2011, at 6:03 PM, Mark Myers wrote:

> I know there's been a bunch of discussion about this but I'm lazy....
>
> Have a client with a 2 hour documentary, never intended for broadcast,
> who is now asking about having it captioned. Can anyone give me a ball
> park amount of dollars we should be looking at, and any referrals?
>
> Realistically I think the client will choke when they find out how much
> they're looking at but who knows....
>
> Thanks!
> Mark
>
> --
>
> Owner, Director
> SR Film & Video Productions
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> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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