[Athen] captioning commercial dvds

[John Foliot]

James Bailey wrote:

> 

> I may need to caption a commercial DVD. Assuming all the legal and

> copyright stuff is taken care of, what are the steps involved? Please

> forgive any cross postings and I look forward to input.

> 


James,

What is/will be your final delivery format?  This matters because of the
final time-stamp format you will require.

Essentially the workflow process is this:

	- transcribe audio content to text
	- synchronize text to audio (time-stamp) and save/export
time-stamped file to the appropriate format
	- integrate the captioning with the media asset

(LOL, I see my colleague Sean Keegan has jumped in as well with a much
larger response.)

One final thing to note is that now many commercial DVD's are
'copy-protected', which can add an additional wrinkle to the process,
especially if you intend to re-burn a DVD as the delivery format.  There
are a few pirate-ware tools out there that "crack" DVDs [not that I
advocate or use them, but, hey, I know about them <grin> - ask Google, she
knows too ;)] and sometimes you also need to "shrink" the overall file
bundle (or eliminate extraneous data) to fit on a blank DVD (again, there
is pirate-ware out there that can do this), however it isn't as simple as
1,2,3.

Unless you have a large pile, Sean's suggestion of outsourcing is one you
should consider strongly...

	* www.automaticsync.com 
	* http://3playmedia.com/ (former MIT Grads)

JF