User`s guide

101
Initializing the Encoder in MacCaption
Now that you’ve got your encoder physically set up, it's time to activate it in MacCaption. Go to
the Caption menu and select Device…now select your encoder. Then go to Configure and select
the correct port that your device is connected to. Each encoder’s configuration is defaulted to the
correct settings for Baud rate, Data bits, Parity, and Stop bits so leave those untouched unless
you need to change them for a specific reason. When you have set the correct configuration, go
to the Caption menu again and choose Initialize Device. If you select this and nothing happens,
that means your device has been successfully initialized, otherwise an error message will pop up.
What to do if your Mac doesn’t have a Serial Data Port
Some Mac notebooks and systems do not come with a Serial Data Port. If you are operating on a
desktop, you may purchase a PCI card with a Serial Data Port on it and install it. If you are
using a notebook and cannot install a serial data port, we recommend that you purchase a Serial
to USB device. These devices plug into a USB slot and have a number of Serial Data Port slots
on them. We recommend using the Keyspan brand Serial to USB adapters as these are the ones
we used while developing these functions.
Tape to Tape with a Transcript
Linear captioning with the MacCaption works the same way as post production captioning, the
only difference is that when you hit the “+” key, you will be sending the caption out to the
encoder for broadcast or tape instead of time coding it. Simply import your text file into
MacCaption and format the entire text file accordingly as you would for any post production job.
Now make sure your hardware encoder is setup properly and that you have your video source
going into the input on the encoder and the output going to your record deck. When you are
ready to begin recording captions, simply press play on the play deck, press record on the record
deck, and as you hear the first word of each caption, hit the “+” key to send that particular
caption to the hardware encoder. If you mess up you will have to stop and rewind both tapes to
the same point and start from there again.
Live Captioning
With a Transcript
This works the same exact way as the Tape to Tape method, except instead of setting up a record
deck to the output of your encoder, you will be sending your output signal from the encoder to a
deck for broadcast.