FCP Closed Captions in Timeline

I seem to have read somewhere that there is a way to drop caption data right into the timeline in Final Cut Pro. This in turn means that this data is now linked to the footage from here on out. i.e. if I export for DVD, or compress for a podcast, this caption data is always there.

Problem is, I can't find this info anywhere online. Can anyone point me in a direction? Am I talking out my left knee, or does anyone know if and how this is possible. Maybe it's called something different in the FCP world.

Thanks in advance for your help.

You might have misunderstood something.
QuickTime is supporting the SCC format if the plugin is installed. So you can see the text of an SCC file in QT Player, you can import this SCC file into Final Cut but the only thing you get in Final Cut is a white movie.
For Close Caption the file content needs to rendered into the line 21 of the video and you need a hardware which is able to decode Line 21 text. That's not given for any video hardware on the Mac though both AJA and BMD support Line 21 with both capture and playout.
Also Line 21 currently is only supported officially for NTSC SD. The new HD formats are handled slightly different by different approaches.
With DVD Studio you can import SCC files and they will be included in the video stream. With all other iStuff it won't work as they don't have an decoder build in.
What you can do is to set up your subtitles in FCP (or somewhere else) and convert these titles to a 3gpp Timed Text track. This file then can be added to the H.264 video . Then it needs a few little hacks to make them a real subtitle track.

Hope that helps.

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

Thanks for the detailed explanation Andreas. I'm finding there is a lot of interpretation on the definition of Closed captions depending on which world you live in. DVD vs, online distribution vs over the air broadcast. Perhaps if I describe what our goal is, I might save myself some trouble in talking about something I don't know enough about.

We are a large production house with a 90 TB XSAN fiber network. We have our own in house captionists who use caption maker. They can kick out a variety of file formats such as .scc which we currently use for captions on our DVD's.

We want to add these same captions to our H.264 podcasts. I have figured out how to do this as well, I think basically it was a times text file like you described.

What we were wanting to do (if it's possible) is embed these caption files into the original 8bit uncompressed video file which is then stored on our Final Cut Server, or shared storage. This way everyone who accesses the file (duplication, web encoding, over the air broadcast, DVD production) has the caption data embedded right in the file.

Seems like a great idea, just not sure how realistic it is. Did that make any sense?

This sounds like tough plan.

As said with HD there is no plan for "standard" CC even though companies like CPC say can do it.
But if you read the fine print it's only working with an Omeon playout server. This HD CC was originally developed by SGI Japan in cooperation with the Omneon guys.

The approach we had at an experimental state was to use QT metadata with our internal format, this is a way to keep the caption data in the QT file. The problem is that we need to write an Importer Plugin to burn in titles during the file import.
Another option with this approach is to do the edit without any visible titles (same as with CC). When the edit is done we export the sequence as XML and use this XML to retrieve the caption data (we do something like this currently with BWAV Audio) and create a 3gpp text file which then can be embedded into the different formats.

If you're interested, maybe we can create such a workflow - but definitively not for free.

Andreas

CPC will be at our SuperMeet at NAB.

Just watched this. Kind of cool.

[www.cpcweb.com]

Michael Horton
-------------------

Yeah, the demo confirms what I said above. Only SD 601, no titles visible in FCP.

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

That sounds a little more like what we'd be working towards. i.e. using the Quicktime metadata to embed the caption info into the original video file. However, I'm not sure this really is saving us much time or effort in our workflow anymore. Kind of one of those "great ideas" that in the end didn't really save any time. I have plenty of those.

I may still dabble in that direction. Tell me one thing though, does that meta data stay attached one I drop that original file into a FCP timeline, edit it, and then export it again?

Nathan

Metadata will be kept in the file until you delete them. The problem is that none of the apps working with video really cares about.
Here an example of what we do currently (just to understand better the metadata thing).
We create movie files made from camera video and external audio in a way that metadata of both types are kept or sometimes some data are added. This is done outside Final Cut Pro.
Those synched clips are imported into Final Cut and the movie will be edited. Using this self-contained (or sometimes referenced movies) does make the whole process bullet proof. You never and under no circumstances will loose sync - different from the standard procedure in FCP.
At the end the the complete Cut will be exported as XML and audio metadata are retrieved. Using this metadata you can either create an Audio EDL or a FCP sequence which refer to the ORIGINAL files. So it can be send to Pro Tools or anywhere else.
The nice thing with Final Cut Pro and using our approach is that Final Cut does read some of the QT metadata. So in one case where we use P2 (without any entry of user metadata) and external audio (the audio guy keeps care of it) opening this movie in any Final Cut project will show Scene/Take Note and cam reel.

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

Forgot that.

I don't have Final Cut Server so I can't proof that - but it will read the metadata and so you will be able in any case to retrieve them from there.

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]