Speaker 1: Hi, Kim Miller here with HowToSellYourVideos.com. And today at NAB, I'm finally getting to meet Steve Holmes, who I worked with at Aberdeen Captioning. And we used their services a few years ago when we were doing some videos that we knew we were going to go to a school market. So it was important, imperative because of regulations that we have closed captions in those videos, and also we had them do subtitling for us as well. And so, Steve, just tell us a little bit about what's the difference between closed captioning, subtitling, and why we need to worry about them.

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Closed captioning is typically encoded into the video signal of your program, and you usually have a black background, a black box, and a particular set of fonts, whereas subtitles are going to look more like... Like what you're accustomed to seeing maybe in a foreign film. You'll have upper and lower case letters, and you can actually have more characters per line with subtitles, which is great for languages because when you're translating from English to Spanish, you actually need more letters, more words to translate the same ideas. So it's convenient to have more space to be able to do that physically on the screen. But then also they get encoded in different ways as well. Captions are going to fulfill 508 and others. There are types of compliance regulations that are set forth through the FCC, whereas subtitles may or may not. They may if they're seen to be within the spirit of the law, but strictly speaking, captioning is going to be fulfilling FCC or ADA compliance issues as well.

Speaker 1: Now can I just do this on my own? I mean, why would I want to go through a service, you know, closed captioning? Doesn't my editing system have this? You can.

Speaker 2: You could possibly do some captioning, not within an edit system, a video edit system per se, but if you were to find maybe a free software online or if you were to purchase a sophisticated captioning software, you could certainly do it yourself. But then there are the issues of trying to get that captioning embedded or encoded or combined with your video elements and put into the proper format that you're maybe going to need. So if you're looking for something that maybe video player online is looking for or if you have a broadcast fulfillment to require, getting it into the proper format that the stations are looking for or even DVD, it can be really tricky getting that captioning information into a DVD or Blu-ray project. Absolutely.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I've not done closed captioning, but I have put subtitling in my DVD Studio Pro. And let me tell you, it takes a lot of time. Yeah. And you need to figure out in the time code where those, you know, you not only have to transcribe it, but then you have to figure out where that they're talking about, the thing that they're talking about. And then closed captioning also adds sounds too.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. You can describe, good point, you can actually indicate when there's maybe a narrator off camera that's doing some speaking. So that way, if somebody's deaf or hard of hearing, they can track who it is that's doing the speaking or music elements. You'll have music notes and sound effects, certainly door closing, car starting. We can add those with caption descriptions, whereas subtitling is going to be strictly words and not description, absolutely.

Speaker 1: So why would it be beneficial to go and use a service such as yours?

Speaker 2: If you want to have dinner at a reasonable hour and see your family, then that's when a company like ours is usually, I say that kiddingly, but in all seriousness too, it is a major time. Yeah. Yup. So with terms of captions, there's a really needed payment and an energy resource to invest in captioning on your own end. I read an article, I think, in one of the HD video magazines that indicated, yes, now you can do captioning for SD and HD and for a myriad of mediums. But by the end of the article, it suggested outsourcing to a caption company, just because it's so complicated, and particularly when you're trying to hit so many different mediums like TV, like the web, maybe YouTube or your mobile devices, kind of under questi ao to jump in and thinking, well, we're going to buy Anna's Instagram quando voi pis Сte devices, there are just so many different elements that enter the equation, and particularly when you're trying to format something for a particular medium, it just becomes very cumbersome.

Speaker 1: Yeah, we've done some client work for a university, and they were not able to put the video on the website until they got it captioned. So we're finding a lot, not just on DVDs or physical products, but it's also required for any way that they can access the information. Right, right, absolutely.

Speaker 2: And that has to do with 508 compliance issues, as they're referred to as. There's a set of standards set forth by either the FCC or the ADA, American with Disabilities Act, and that require you to have your content captioned for accessibility reasons. And by law, you must have captions. You must have captions on your video if you're a government agency. And now even for content producers doing television broadcasts, if they're going to repurpose that content for the web by summer of 2012, this year, you must have all that content captioned for the web as well.

Speaker 1: All right, well, is there anything else I need to know that you want to say about what's happening with you guys? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: Well, we're really excited because we've been a captioning house for the past decade, and we've grown into also a multi-language translation and subtitling company. We do voiceover work as well, but really this last year, it's been our digital file delivery service that's really caught fire. We're able to make the process even simpler than previously when even we've done projects before. We're able to take a hot folder or a Dropbox, if you will, and set it up on your edit system. So a producer can be editing in Avid, Premiere, Final Cut, doesn't matter, can upload a full resolution product to us, and we can transcode it. We can caption it and transcode it into whatever format that they're looking for and actually push the files to a station through our hot folder system in a format that is actually for intended and will play on their play server. So not only will we take the formatting. complication out of the equation, but we're actually delivering better looking video because we're able to format it to the end spec. A lot of times you might have a station that says they can take an MPEG file, which is the closest thing to a universal standard, which really it's not, and we can deliver really exotic formats like an LXF, an MXF, a GXF, and really ultimately give the producer a better looking program. Take all of the complication out of it, and we can worry about the glossy eyes, right? I'm starting to sound smarter than I really am here with this alphabet soup. But really the bottom line is we're basically this one-stop shop. There used to be pre-production, production, and post-production, and there's this ever growing and more increasingly neglected. Fourth category that has to do with captioning, subtitling, and distribution because there's so many formats now that's just so such virgin territory for so many producers.

Speaker 1: I'm glad to hear that actually, because that is something we talked about in our book and something we struggled with is how to explain that because there's that whole delivery system because people are like, well, should I sell it, you know, video on demand and then how do you deliver it? Right. And. And so we have a lot of books out there that are just on the web and we're having a hard time trying to find out how best to get that out there in a way that our end user can view it.

Speaker 2: Right. Right. Exactly. Well, I mean, that's even become our tagline from edit to air. We'll get you there. And it even includes print. Even if we're doing publishing, we can deliver a translation for print. So that can be used in conjunction with whatever materials you have with your DVD project as well. Right. Or even transcription. So, yes, it doesn't matter whether it's TV, DVD, web, mobile applications, that is that is our focus. And that's what we're looking to do is help people because it's very, very confusing. It can be a little overwhelming to say the least.

Speaker 1: Well, thank you, Steve. And I wish you luck here at NAB. And I'm glad to hear about all these other things that you offer, because we're definitely going to use that because we tell you to one of the best things that you could do with your video. And that is also give a transcript of it, have it transcribed. And so then you've got a book product and then you also have the audio. So anyway, one stop shopping here. How do people find you?

Speaker 2: Probably the easiest way would be to visit our website, www.abracap.com. That's A-B-E-R-C-A-P dot com and submit a rate request form or just ask for some information and either myself or another sales engineer will get back to you with with some information.

Speaker 1: Okay, thank you. And I do have to say they have the best customer service of any company we've worked with. So yeah. So this is Kim from HowToSellYourVideos.com. I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. .