Captioning March Madness

03.18.08

That annual rite of chest-bumping, floor-thumping, arm-waving, sneaker-squeaking, fan-screaming action by men and women all over the country begins this Thursday. We will see hundreds of dedicated athletes and coaches and their fans celebrate this ritual on our television screens at home, in bars and restaurants, and even on the computer at work. Behind the scenes are thousands of dedicated professionals working to get you the best camera angle, the clearest hi-def, and the speediest, most accurate captions!

We at CaptionMax are proud that once again we are captioning all 63 of the women’s games and half of the men’s games. To commemorate this, I decided to interview Nate Otterdahl, our Live Captioning Coordinator.

Max: Nate, first I want to say, congratulations on your engagement! Whoo-hoo! You ready?

Nate: Yes. We’re planning to tie the knot August 23rd.

Max: I meant, are you ready for March Madness? Whoo!

Nate: Oh, yes. Definitely. We’ve got all our caption writers lined up and scheduled.

Max: I understand I’m paying for you to fly out to LA for the first week of the tournament. What’s up with that? Don’t we have all the equipment for you here?

Nate: You do – we have excellent facilities in three locations that allow us to manage all of our realtime captioning work. The reason I will be flying out to Burbank for the first week is that we are monitoring so many games and writers in such a short time period, we felt that it would be best to have all the coordinators in the same room.

Max: Who else is involved?

Nate: Mike Hansel, Jerome Halligan, Matt Offerman, and Rich Kennedy.

Max: Didn’t Rich just start working for us?

Nate: Yes, so this will be a good chance to see what he’s made of.

Max: Tell me about the caption writer setup.

Nate: Well, for the opening days of the women's games, we will be doing four games simultaneously. One is selected as the “feature” and the other three only show in their regions. So we'll assign our best writer to the feature game.

Max: All of our writers are great!

Nate: Yes, they are. However, some are exceptional, which can make a difference in a fast-paced game with extremely rapid announcers. So if the feature game turns out to be a blowout, another game gets switched to the feature slot – and we'll move the writer to that game as well.

Max: So you end up playing musical chairs.

Nate: Almost. We’ll have one standby writer for each time block. That means when the women start playing this Saturday, we will have 20 writers scheduled for the 16 games – five writers per four-game block.

Max: That’s a lot of writers to manage. Then there’s the men's games. Saturday is round two, right?

Nate: Correct. They start with 16 games each on Thursday and Friday, in addition to the play-in game by the 64th and 65th seed that we caption Tuesday night, then go to 8 games each for Saturday and Sunday.

Max: Do we have enough TV screens for you guys to catch all the games?

Nate: Just about. Fortunately we shouldn’t be captioning more than six games at any one time.

Max: Ok. I have a technical question for you. I was watching a game the other day, and right in the middle of the word, the captions stopped and didn’t resume for at least five minutes. There wasn’t a commercial break – the game just continued while the captions stayed stuck on the screen. Why is that?

Nate: Most often it is an encoder problem. The encoder, like everything these days, runs on software, and every so often, it can freeze up. Sometimes it freezes because the caption writer’s modem momentarily disconnected and sometimes because, well, it’s software, and software can do that just like the software on your computer.

Max: I knew that! Tell our readers what you do when that happens. Why can’t you just log into the encoder yourself and fix it?

Nate: That would be nice. But usually the fix requires someone walking over to the machine and turning it off and back on to reset it. So when we see the problem, we call our contact at the network. Then she calls her tech at the machine room, and that person does the reset. Then we can reconnect the modem and resume the captioning.

Max: Nate, thanks for talking to me about our annual March Madness project. I know you all will come through with flying colors, as always.

Nate: Thank you. It will be good to get it done. We’ve been preparing for this for months.

Max: You bet. And congratulations again. She’s a lucky gal.

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