SECTION MEETING REPORT

Meeting Date:

March 11, 1997

Attendance:

12

Location:

St. Clair College, Windsor, Ontario

Speakers:

Norman Trask, President, Caption Resource Center, Oakville, Ont.

Emmanuel Faraon, Programmer, Caption Resource Center

Subjects:

Closed Captioning

Mr. Trask began with a discussion of the economic and political aspects of closed captioning in Canada and the United States. He said the Canadian model has been very similar to the US way of doing things, that is, allowing the marketplace to develop the mechanism for implementing and paying for the service. In the US, a government/institutional funding model has fallen into place. He gave some statistics on the amount of programming that is currently captioned and is expected to be captioned and the cost of captioning program material, and that with commercial sponsors, captioning is becoming a source of revenue in some Canadian broadcast organizations. An overview of the technical advances in captioning followed, with improvements in real-time and off-line captioning equipment discussed. One of the difficulties currently hindering real-time closed captioning efforts is the shortage of stenographers who can render captions fast enough to keep up with program material such as newscasts. This is being helped, said Mr. Trask, by the training provided by schools such as the three in the Toronto area dedicated to developing and training personnel with skills sufficient for real-time captioning. With reliable voice-recognition technology many years or decades off, the human interface will be the key for a long time to come.

Mr. Faraon demonstrated the Caption Resource Center's Voice Writer system, a computer-based offline closed captioning system that stores the program material in compressed form on disk, and with a windowed interface, allows the operator to compose exact captions for each scene. These captions are later added to the program tape using a conventional captioning encoder fed with data from the Voice Writer. This has resulted in a savings of 10 to 30 percent in the time it takes to caption a program over the conventional method which involves rolling a tape back and forth while composing captions.

Questions from the audience followed.

Submitted by:

Frank Maynard, WKBD-TV Secretary/Treasurer, SMPTE Detroit Section 810-355-7129 maynard@oeonline.com