Hi all,

Thank you for responding to my inquiry regarding
suggestions for ideas to caption videos for deaf
students' coursess.

Please excuse the double postings if you get both
DSSHE and EASI postings.  I promised that I
would share the information that had been sent to
me.

THE SUGGESTIONS:

We use several software products to do
captioning on a quick turn around basis,
but it ends up using a subtitle like process
instead of actually providing closed captions
which does require a specialized encoder. You
also need decent quality video recorders for
input and output of the video tape.

The one piece of hardware you will need to purchase,
in addition to a high quality computer with lots of
RAM, is a good quality video capture device and this
can be done by buying a Hauppauge WinTV card to insert
in the computer.  We use the WinPVR 350 and are very
happy with it.

http://www.hauppage.com/pages/products/data_350.html


XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

This isn't an easy question to answer, and
unfortunately I'll have to give you my students
least favorite answer "It depends". It all depends
on your demand and resources. I have provided you
a list of the best links out there. Let me break
it down the best I can. There really isn't a software
that can caption without some hardware. For example
a VCR has RCA jack in the back of the machine (these
are the red, white, and yellow ports) these ports
produce and analog signal. You need something(a
dazzle is most popular) to convert that analog
signal into a digital signal for a computer to
understand. You will also need an output device
to produce the final captioned tape, or DVD. Let
me explain the process for captioning.

First: you need to create a transcript of the tapes
audio. For this we use work studies and Dragon Natural
speak to speed up the process. This takes about 2 hours
for an hour of tape (with a trained work-study)

Second: you need to create a time coded copy of the
tape, you don't have to do this but it helps to insure
the caption in in the proper place on the tape. Example
a 2:03:02 Bob says: hi john. If you don't use time codes
you have to do a lot of guessing.

Third: you need to create you captioning lines that you
want to show on the screen, so you need to break up the
dialog into discourse segments

Forth: you have to plug the dialog into the times to be
displayed

Last: make a copy of the tape with the captions on
line 21.

It's a lot of work and time consuming. If you feel
that you would like to create your own captioning as
I explained the first link below is for the system we
use. It's of professional quality and costs about 8-9K

The second link has an inexpensive system that can create
open caption only (can not turn off) It's easier to use
but is of lesser quality.  However they do captioning for
you for $4 per minute for Ed institutions. It use to me 8
when we bought our system and we thought it would be more
cost effective to do it in house. The 3rd is a captioning
service that has tons of experience, we used them once or
twice. The last link is an inexpensive system that is for
MAC only and I have heard it's ok, but more of a patch and
repair than a good quality product that will last a long
time. I hope this all helped and feel free to ask me anything
my number is 212 678 3853, Michael Canale


http://www.cpcweb.com/

http://www.ccmaker.com/

http://www.captionmax.com/index.html

http://www.compusense.net/caption_maker.htm


If any of you others have suggestions since you will have returned
from the AHEAD conference, it would be appreciated.

Thanks all.

Jack Clevenger, Manager
Disability Resources and Services
Mesa Community College
Mesa, AZ