There’s a lot of misinformation on the net about how to do proper Quicktime captioning using Compressor. Here’s the deal.

To start with – Compressor 3.0.4 can caption MPEG-2 files, as well as MOV and M4V files. When it first shipped, it could only deal with MPEG-2, and some sources haven’t been updated to reflect the additional formats. That means, you can add a proper closed captioning track to a quicktime movie, and have it playable on an iPhone or Apple TV, etc.

Next, the captions must be in the Scenarist Closed Caption (SCC) format. This is a really funky format, as my recent rants have attested. The definitive site on the format is that of the SCC Tools project. There’s not a ton of other information out there, as much of the spec is locked up in a design document that’ll run you $170.

I believe the commercial MacCaption application will output SCC, as will a handful of other applications. Next week, I’ll post some sample code for converting DFXP (flash) captions into SCC.

So, to get started, open Compressor and add your video. Highlight the background space of your imported video and then click the “additional information” tab.

Now, select “choose” at the top and point to your SCC file. Click save at the bottom of the pane.

Now you just need to pick your preset (again, any mpeg-2, mov or m4v preset) and submit the job as per usual.

Perian 1.1.1 came out today, with fixes for flash video playback and a number of other things. This gives me a good chance to mention something we do when using Perian with Media Mill.

Because Perian doesn’t always play nice with other codecs on your system, I was long hesitant to add it to the codec pack we use for the media mill cluster. But, a few months back I realized I could do a custom build of perian that just had the codecs I wanted. It’s not very hard at all. Here’s the deal.

First, get Xcode 3.1 – you’ll need to sign up for a free apple developer account.

Next, open up your terminal, move to a directory you want to work in, and type “svn co http://svn.perian.org/tunk/” which will give you the most recent Perian source.

Next, browse to that folder in Finder and double click the xcode project file. Find the FFusionCodec.r file and double click it.

It’s a fairly readable file, with sections for each codec. Just comment out or delete the codecs you don’t want. In my case, I kept just a few.

When you’re done, hit the project setting dropdown and switch to deployment, then press the big ‘build and go’ button. A while later, it’ll finish, and you can find the “build” folder in the same place you found the xcode project. In there, find the deployment folder, and in there, find your nice shiny new Perian.component. Drop it in your /Library/Quicktime folder and you’re done.

If you want to double check that you’ve gotten rid of the codecs you don’t want, grab a copy of Fiendishthngs and run it before and after installing.

Later today I’ll give a presentation on simple video production to a group on campus. Attached to this post is the handout that I mention in the presentation.