Captioning QuickTime Media with CaptionSync

Automatic Sync Technologies has partnered with Apple to deliver high quality closed captions and subtitles for QuickTime, very quickly and cost effectively.

Streaming video content over the web using QuickTime is gaining tremendous popularity, particularly in education, and as support for seminars and conferences. This new medium allows viewers to attend a presentation without the inconvenience and cost of travel, and can substantially reduce facilities costs for the content provider.

Captioned QuickTime media fosters a better viewing experience, which in turn leads to higher adoption rates, better retention of the presented material and higher user satisfaction. Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) maintains a strong focus on webcasting, especially in educational settings, and can work with clients to develop fully automated solutions to caption and publish webcast content.

Output

Content with a transcript takes about 5 minutes, media requiring transcription takes about 2-3 business days (1 business day rush transcription is also available). And of course our automated solution is available around the clock — whenever you need it!

Emailed back are QuickTime .QT.TXT and .SMIL files, .SCC files, and/or .3GP files, ready to place up on your QTSS or web server.

Benefits

Captioning also offers a number of additional benefits to all users that should not be overlooked:

• Compliance: ADA and Section 508 require captioning for most broadcast and distributed video content. Webcasts fall under ADA and are subject to these captioning requirements. If you are making a webcast publicly available, then it should be captioned.
• Indexing and Searching: because captioning involves the synchronization of text content with the audio/video material, it allows the content to become easily searchable with traditional text searches.
• Universal Access: design your content from the ground up to be as usable as possible by as many people as possible.
• Improving Comprehension: captioning improves comprehension for all viewers,
  especially for those with English as a second language.

The CaptionSync Automated Captioning Process

The captions are stored in a secondary file, and do not impact your media file or the process by which you produce it.

Upon submitting your media file to CaptionSync for captioning, you will receive the appropriate secondary file containing the caption data. Your media server can then easily be made to stream both the media file and the caption data file to viewers, automatically enabling captions to be viewed.

Advanced Features

Using a standard set of markup commands, producers can optionally mark-up the text transcript in order to control the exact format, location and content of the captions. This feature allows producers to dictate the font, color, and positioning of any caption, as well as provide content to appear in the captions that is not found in the audio track (symbols, sound effect references).

Priced Right

• Web-based pay per use service.
• No software to buy or install.
• Choose just the services needed (you can provide your own verbatim text transcript to get captions, or you can have us do the transcription for you, or just get a transcript).
• Pay online via credit card or Visa/MasterCard branded purchase cards.