CaptionMax audio describers have been video describing lots of great British children programs this month and we’ve picked up some new, fun phrases along the way.
Here are some British English phrases that we’ll use more often!
What are your favorites?
Thursday, April 21st, some of our staff attended the Lifeworks 25th Annual Celebration. Lifeworks is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people with disabilities live fuller lives that are integrated into the flow of the community experience. They collaborate with employers, volunteers, and government agencies to create expanded opportunities for people with disabilities. All in all, a great organization and we are proud to employ a Lifeworks client!
We’ve gone to the event in years past, but this was extra special because our own Kyle Murray was nominated for the Advocate of the Year award! Besides her regular job with CaptionMax, Kyle also works closely with Mike, our Lifeworks client. She helps him when he has questions, works with him to find solutions, and acts as a liaison between CaptionMax and Lifeworks. We are so proud that she was recognized!
As always, we took some photos at the event. Enjoy, and in true CaptionMax form, we wouldn’t be us without some silliness thrown in.
(Jessica Matelski, Elaine, Emma Kluge, and Jason Voskuil)
(Shawn Schueller, Hayley Matthews-Jones, and Casey Wambsganss)
(Mike Walters and Kyle Murray)
(Casey and Mike)
(Shawn, Hayley, Kyle, Jess, Emma, and Casey)
(Mike and Kyle)
CaptionMax has a dedicated Consumer Advisory Board with experts in all kinds of accessibility. As guest bloggers, we ask our board members to share their accessibility stories. Our next CAB guest blogger is Timothy Smitley, a junior at Prior Lake High School in Minnesota. He is new to our board, and we are excited to have the opportunity to get to know him better! Take it away, Timothy.
Hi everyone, my name is Timothy Smitley and this is my first year as a member of the CaptionMax CAB team. I am a junior attending Prior Lake High School and am going on my fifth year of living in Minnesota. I can’t believe that next year I’m going to be a senior and heading off to college.
To tell a little about myself, I was born in California and lived in L.A. for twelve years. I started to become visually impaired when I was diagnosed with eye cancer. After going through all my treatments I was left with almost normal vision in my right eye while my left eye had to be removed. For the next ten years, my vision held stable until about January of my eighth grade year, I woke up one morning and couldn’t see past my nose. My family and I eventually learned that my retina had detached. After a couple surgeries that tried to reattach it, my vision has decreased significantly to a point where I need to use a mobility cane and text-to-speech software to use a computer. But with the aid of some special glasses I can still play Guitar Hero.
Guitar Hero is just one of my interests; others include reading, listening to music, Knowledge Bowl, Judo, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. For those of you that don’t know what Knowledge Bowl is, it’s a like playing jeopardy but you’re on a team that has up to five people and there are no categories of questions. The competitions consist of five rounds, one is a written round (scantron test) and the other four are oral. During the oral rounds we use a buzz strip to signal when we know the answer. Once you buzz in you get fifteen seconds to confer with your team before giving your answer. I joined my school’s K.B. team last year thanks to the constant encouragement from my ninth grade geography teacher. This is my second year, and it has been a blast. I’m on the JV team, but chose to bump down to our lowest team because they didn’t have enough people and needed an extra person. Our season has just ended and we took eleventh in state. Next year I’ll be on the varsity team and hopefully a captain as well.
My other main interest is Judo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I was introduced to Judo through the Northern Plains Vision of Sport Camp up at BSU. Judo is a Japanese martial art that involves standing throws, pins, chokes, and armbars. I was doing Judo a little over a year until my class was canceled due to financial issues at the gym. Before I had to stop, I was at an orange belt and about ready to test for a green belt. This would have put me four belts away from a black belt. I have participated in one tournament, but lost because the rules had been changed to favor people who knew Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I’ve started Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu a few weeks ago because of my interest in martial arts, it’s based heavily in mat work, and I didn’t like losing in that tournament. So far it has been fun but hard because the rest of the class has been doing it for at least six months and they are mostly between the ages of twenty and thirty. Despite all that, I still do my best and I am able to hold my own.
I hope you have enjoyed this little window into my life and I’m looking forward to writing more posts.
urceolate
shaped like an urn. A pitcher plant is urceolate. Tulips, on the other hand, are not; they’re bell-shaped, or campanulate.
epiphyte
a nonparasitic plant that grows on another plant or object. Examples include bromeliads and mosses but not tulips. Tulips would never impose like that.
espalier
the training of a woody plant so that it grows in a decorative flat plane. If you could splice a tulip into a woody tree, I’ll bet that would make for some really pretty espalier.
explosive dehiscence
the rapid opening of a plant structure to disperse the seeds a distance from the plant. It’s really cool but a little show-offy and gauche, which is why tulips don’t participate in it.
tulipomania
a word actually in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but I won’t hold it against you if you don’t believe me and need to look it up yourself. In Holland in the 1600s, a tulip bulb fad caused prices to rise until single bulbs were selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Eventually, people came to realize that trading one’s house, livestock, and iPad for a flower that would probably be eaten by rabbits anyway wasn’t perhaps the best decision they’d ever made, and the market crashed. That’s some hardcore petal appreciation, Dutch people. Nobody can accuse you of being pansies.
The NAB Show is always filled with some amazing new gadgets and dynamic sessions. Here are some of the fun things that we learned at this year’s NAB Show.
1. Andre’s in the Monte Carlo is really great eats. The tongue was a revelation.
2. The word “cloud” has lost all meaning. It’s everywhere and nowhere. Let’s just make it work!
3. We met lots of happy clients. Now we’re just trying to lure them to our MN office with promises of excellent fishing. Any takers?
4. It’s always fun to see the faces of people you’ve only emailed.
5. South Hall was dim like a nightclub and full of flashing lights and flashy new products. North Hall is serious business for broadcast pros. We found buddies in both halls.
Bat: a human-cow goddess of the sky from early ancient Egypt.
Fungo Bat: a baseball bat designed specifically for hitting fungos (practice fly balls), used by a batter who throws the ball instead of a pitcher.
Patagium: the membrane that forms the surface of a bat’s wing.
Batman: a unit of mass during the Ottoman Empire. Interestingly, Wikipedia states that the Tartar batman “is an equivalent to 1000 pood” and further clarifies by stating that a pood “is a unit of mass equal to 40 funt.” I’m glad we got that straightened out.
Batman, Turkey: a city in eastern Turkey known for its oil reserves. It’s the capital of Batman Province and is located on the Batman River. It’s home to the Batman Air Base, the Batman Express newspaper, and the Batman BS soccer club.
You’ve been looking at adding captions to your video for weeks, months, maybe even years and now you want to know who does the work? We’d like to introduce you to a few of the jobs behind the scenes of the captioning world.
The Transcriber
Does the down and dirty grunt work of creating a written representation of a program’s audio to be used with captioning. Transcribing is the first step in the captioning process. There’s a lot of research done to get the correct spelling of names, places, and activities.
The Caption Editor
The caption editor takes the transcript and turns it into captions. They do the bulk of the captioning work by adding the timing and placement of the captions. The caption editor also does some research to double check the work of the transcriber.
The Proofer
The last step in the offline captioning process is the proofer. This person is a seasoned caption editor who review the program to ensure proper style & accuracy.
The Realtime Caption Writer
Live captioning is a stressful job so we need to use trained Court and Conference Reporters. The live captioner types while the program is airing, which means that mistakes cannot be proofed before airing. Whew….they have to work hard.
There is another cool way to add subtitles to your video! Did you know that you can embed subtitle files into Final Cut Pro (FCP) project? It’s really easy to do and your subtitles always look sharp.
(This technique is available for versions 5.1.2 and later. Sadly, this won’t work for FCP versions older than 5.1.2 or Final Cut Express.)
An XML file with PNG graphics that matches the timing of your FCP sequence. (That’s it!)
The XML file with PNG graphics provides an open, transparent, graphic format that anyone can utilize with a wide range of tools.
Here’s the basic idea; however there are a few more steps when working on an actual project.
First, import the .xml into Final Cut Pro.
(The XML import allows you to match your subtitle sequence to your master program sequence. Just scroll through your list of sequence setting choices.)
(A new sequence is created that includes only the timed subtitle PNGs. Open the sequence and take a look. Pretty snazzy!)
Second, open your finished video sequence and drag your CaptionMax Subtitle sequence onto the track above your finished video.
Lastly, render the finished video sequence with subtitles and play it in FCP to test it.
Now you’re ready to export your video out of FCP and into any format. Your video will have open, accessible captions that look very sharp!
If you have FCP & an excellent Video Editor, then we recommend this format to add open captions to your video file.
This is the workflow we recommend for FCP but Avid & Blu-ray both have similar set-ups.
- Avid users with the Avid DS subtitle plugin can get an Avid DS text file.
- Blu-ray also uses XML/PNG files, but the XML file is totally different than the FCP XML. Exports for FCP & Blu-ray are, unfortunately, not interchangeable. Be sure to clarify your editing system when talking to your project manager!
- Users of other editing systems are out of luck—there isn’t a subtitle file that can be imported by, for example, Adobe Premiere, unless you’ve heard something we haven’t!
Happy editing!
Isn’t it great when you can learn a new word that will actually come in handy because you often find yourself looking at something that could be described with precisely that new word? And then you use the word, and your companions look at you blankly and then continue their conversation about where to eat lunch? Well, that won’t happen with these words, because I’m pretty sure that everybody you know reads the CaptionMax blog.
cyclorama (or cyc): a large, often curving backdrop used on stage, in photography, or as a green screen.
l’esprit de l’escalier/staircase wit: the unfortunate phenomenon of thinking of a witty response when it’s too late.
MacGuffin: a term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock for a plot element that drives the story, often something which all the characters want to obtain.
**Examples of MacGuffins: a secret document, a bomb threat, the Maltese Falcon, the Holy Grail.
stot: a Scots verb meaning “to bounce,” this word is used to describe that funny movement that gazelles and similar animals do when they bounce high in the air with all four legs straightened.
zastruga (plural: zastrugi) (also: sastruga): a hard ridge of snow shaped by the wind. Employees of CaptionMax World Headquarters in Minnesota can still use this word for a few more months, and the rest of the world can use it when watching news and weather footage from Minnesota. Oh, that’s cold!
This year, we once again participated in the “Show Your Spirit Day” to raise money for The V Foundation for Cancer Research. We work with our client ESPN each year to raise money for this excellent charity.
As the pictures below demonstrate, “Show Your Spirit Day” encourages employees to wear team gear as a show of support for our team fight against cancer. CaptionMax is a team in whatever we do, and this cause is no exception! Of course, even being a team does not mean that the Admin Department is not rife with tension each year during baseball playoffs as Robin, HR/Communication Manager and a die-hard Yankees fan in the Burbank office, works with Shawn, Finance Manager and loyal Twins fan in the Minneapolis office. Emails may have been exchanged this year in which photos of a broom and the word sweep were bandied about, but I am not at liberty to reveal more.
The V Foundation was founded in 1993 by ESPN and the late Jim Valvano, legendary basketball coach and ESPN commentator, and is an amazing charity. Since 1993, The Foundation has raised more than $100 million to fund cancer research grants nationwide. It not only gives 100% of all new proceeds to research, it has received six consecutive top 4-star ratings from Charity Navigator.
We really like knowing that The V Foundation maintains the lowest overhead among cancer research fundraising organizations, so our money goes directly to research. CaptionMax matches staff contributions up to $1,000, so our money goes twice as far.
We had a great day in our sports paraphernalia and enjoyed the chance to give back, too. For more information on The V Foundation, please visit http://www.jimmyv.org/
(Some of our MPLS office.)
(Our MPLS office can’t stay serious for long!)
(Some of our Burbank office.)
(Thanks for supporting The V Foundation!)