What our captioners want to know:
What stations want to know:
Do we have access to the station's newsroom and rundowns? A critical concern our captioners have is whether or not there's access to a station's newsroom within an hour or so before air time. In order to provide a station the highest quality captioners possible, most accurate captioning possible, it is imperative that a captioner have access to the rundown to confirm spellings of local names, places, and stories in the local news. Who is our contact in Master Control, Engineering, and the Assignment Desk? It is very important for a station to have a person or persons available during all newscasts to be familiar with the technical aspects of captioning; that is, where the audio/IFB line and encoder are that are used for captioning, resetting the encoder modem, resetting the IFB audio line, "flipping the switch" to allow the captions to come through, and otherwise troubleshooting problems with the captioner. This will help to solve problems quickly so that captioning can resume promptly. What differentiates real-time from offline captioning? A captioner performs real-time captioning at the same time as the station airs its broadcast. The captioner is connected to the station by phone lines and sends the captions simultaneously as the words are spoken on air. Providing accurate content at speeds averaging 200 words per minute or faster is a top priority of the real-time captioner. Offline captioning is not done live on air. The text is edited in-house and manipulated to provide a cleaner text before it is encoded onto the broadcast tape. Can we do real-time bilingual captioning? Caption Colorado is working with several clients to deliver this product and will make it available on a limited basis. I'd like to be able to incorporate my news onto my Internet site. Can I do my captioning on there, as well? Yes, purchasing an additional piece of equipment makes it possible for a station to collect the captioned files from a newscast and manipulate it onto your website. We are pleased to be able to offer this service and product to clients, broadening the opportunities the Internet brings to stations. Why are there strange symbols instead of letters on the screen when I view captioning? Stenotype machines transmit only letters and punctuation marks. Symbols, boxes and color are caused by bad reception, sometimes due to either weather conditions and/or faulty equipment or TV sets. |
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