Well, more accurately, he talks about the post process on Transformers.

But I’ve developed a rather nasty case of bronchitis and am sucking down antibiotics, so it might be a bit delayed…

(Or nearabouts – right now I’m in Tokyo)

Dig the travel blog for more info.

Also, for anyone that has installed Parallels 3.0 and found that Cisco VPN doesn’t work anymore, check out this thread.

As is probably made clear by some recent posts, I’ve been working on bringing captioning to our web video delivery. Now that we’ve made it so simple to compress and publish your video to the web, we need to make it just as easy to be ADA compliant with that video. For many folks, that means captioning the video.

First the bad news – no matter which way you cut it, doing proper captioning is time consuming, expensive, or both.

The good news is that it doesn’t need to be quite as expensive or time consuming as you might think. Here’s a rundown of the options.

First off, you need a transcript of your video. You can type directly into captions, but that process is going to be pretty painful. Realistically, what you want is just a raw text transcript of your video – no special formatting needed. I like the free Express Scribe software for Windows or Mac. If you were doing a lot of this sort of thing, you’d definitely want to get a foot pedal of some sort as well. Or a grad student. Either will work.

Now that you’ve got your transcript, you need to time it to your video and generate your captions.

If you’re the do-it-yourself type, you can get an application like MAGPie and do your own captioning and timing. This is the most time consuming but least expensive option. MAGPie isn’t an incredibly intuitive application, but once you get a feel for it you’ll be able to produce perfectly acceptable captions. There’s also commercial captioning software, like CCaption, which provide more features (like direct embedding) at a pretty steep cost.

If that’s not your thing though, there’s a really cool service from a company called Automatic Sync Technologies which will take your video and your transcript and use text-to-speech to sync them up. I’ve been doing some testing with it and it seems really reliable. That’s what I used to time the captions for my demo. It’s not a free service, but the pricing is incredibly reasonable. If you don’t have a transcript, you can pay an additional fee to have them transcribe the video as well.

Once you’ve done the captioning, you’ll end up with a timed text file. Here’s a sample. This is in the DFXP format which is used by the new Flash CS3 captioning tool, as well as various other flash plugins. Other video formats have their own captioning formats. The new quicktime release (7.1.6) claims to add support for captioning, though I’m not clear on what that actually means yet.

My development site for Media Mill now supports taking these timed files as transcripts, which will automatically be displayed when viewing Flash videos. I’ll make this feature live once I’ve done some more cross-platform testing and finished up a few additional new features.

Anyways, that’s a quick rundown on the world of captioning, from my perspective. It’s really not that painful, and I strongly encourage you to check out the Automatic Sync Technologies website.

I just wanted to highlight a really nice piece by a student, Deb Moe, which recently won the “Get it on Record” contest.

Dig it.

I’m off to NAB tomorrow, hopefully I’ll have mass quantities of posts.

I’m giving a little presentation tomorrow at the VRA25 conference. To that end, I wanted to post links to a couple different bits of Media Mill info, in case folks come looking.

Media Mill

QTInfo Video Info app

Media Mill Blog

So, I’ve been playing today with a little issue that occurs when roundtripping video between Final Cut and Motion. This is the situation in which you select a clip in your timeline in Final Cut, right click on it and select “send to Motion Project.” Then, you do your Motion work and save the project. When you return to Final Cut, your video clip has magically updated with the composite from Motion. Hoorah!

However, there’s a little glitch that occurs with color rendering during this process. The signal going to Motion doesn’t match the signal that comes back. Here’s an example, taken from an 8bit uncompressed timeline.

Here’s the video as it exists in Final Cut Pro initially

Here’s the video that comes back from Motion

If you look at the histogram and RGB parades, you’ll see a pretty big difference in the images. This isn’t a huge deal in most cases, but I was recently working on a shot that had a heavily saturated green component. There is a very definite shift in both white balance and luminance.

I called ProVideo Support, and they actually reproduced the problem and promised to report it. That’s a first …

Hey, it’s up. It sounds better. Woo.

Just a little note to tuck away for future reference. I added another 2gigs of ram to my MacPro yesterday, and found that it would no longer wake from sleep. I’d just get a blue screen that wouldn’t go away. I ended up solving it by manually reseting the SMC via the button on the motherboard. I think that the issue occurred because I didn’t unplug the computer while swapping the ram. Because of this, it was never without power for the requisite 15 seconds that it takes to drain and flush the SMC normally.

In any case, after resetting the SMC, all seems well. I think.

Every now and again someone will ask me why we don’t support RealVideo encoding on Media Mill. The answer is because we can’t. However, there’s an article up on Kenstone right now that seems to imply otherwise. Most of what the article covers is in line with the way we handle non-Quicktime formats on Media Mill, but the Real plugin bit is a off. Their plugin doesn’t work in 10.4, and doesn’t support intel. Even if it did, I don’t believe the Real plugin ever worked within Compressor.

As Real says here, “There are no plans on the schedule for fixes or feature enhancements to the plug-in. Community members and developers seeking compatibility with Tiger 10.4 and/or with desire to enhance the plug-in, are invited to download the plug-in source for fix and further application development. ” I.E., Don’t get your hopes up.