>> FAQ
Does the FCC require captioning on everything now?
On Thursday, August 7th, 1997, the FCC unanimously approved new regulations, which will mandate captioning on virtually all television programming in the United States. The FCC is phasing in the plan over an eight-year transition period. As of January 1, 2006, all new programming must be captioned.
What video formats does Taylor Captioning Services accept?
TCS accepts and delivers videos in the DVCam, MiniDV, DVCPRO, HDV, Betacam SP, and DigiBeta tape formats. If your broadcast is in another format, send us your broadcast on an external hard drive and we’ll return it to you with the captions encoded. We'll even provide the hard drive for you!
What types of captions are availalbe?
There are currently three primary types of caption formats used:
>> Pop-on
Pop-on captions are the industry standard for pre-recorded material. The entire caption appears on the screen at once, and can be placed anywhere on the screen. When a new Pop-on caption is added, the old one is erased.
>> Roll-up
Roll-up captions are used almost exclusively for live broadcasts, and are usually located at the bottom of the screen. Words are added one at a time to the end of a line, and when the line is filled, it rolls up, staying visible while a new line is started.
>> Paint-on
The caption appears on the screen one letter at a time, but unlike roll-up captions, a paint-on caption ends up as a stationary block like pop-on captions. Paint-on captions are rarely used and are most often seen in the very first captions when little time is available to read the caption or in "overlay" captions added to an existing caption.
Is there a difference between 100% digital and 100% digital uncompressed captioning?
Yes! 100% Digital Captioning refers to video that is captured, encoded, and printed over FireWire using the compressed DV codec. DV compression produces digital generation loss, which creates artifacts around edges, text and small objects. Companies capturing video using DV compression may claim their encoding process has "no generation loss", but any video captured using a digital compression codec will lose quality.
Digital Uncompressed refers to video that is not processed by any data compression system at any stage of the process. Uncompressed video is the highest video quality available, and is the only format to truly offer no generation loss!
Taylor Captioning Services encodes all video 100% Digital Uncompressed.
See the difference here.
