User`s guide

139
Caption Tips
Suggestions for Breaking Lines
You should watch captioned programs on the television to get an idea how professional
captioning is done. You will learn a lot in regards to breaking text into individual captions,
positioning the captions and use of time sequencing. You will notice, many times professional
captioners adjust the timing of the captions to give uniform readability.
There are various signs that will indicate that text needs to be broken into separate captions.
1. End a caption at the end of a sentence. The import file option can make these breaks
automatically (“.”, “?”, and “!”)
2. End captions at commas and semicolons if they come at a natural pause in the dialog and
conclude a phase. The import file option can make these breaks automatically as well, but
there are many commas in English that are NOT good places to break text.
However, when you break text into individual captions, they should make grammatical sense.
Here is an example:
Unformatted, Raw Text:
On the way to the airport, I got caught in
traffic and ended up being late for my
flight. I had to wait around for five hours
to catch the next available flight
.
A poor way to caption it:
On the way to the airport,
I got caught in
traffic and ended up being late
for my flight. I had to wait
around for five hours to catch
the next available flight.
A good way to caption it:
On the way to the airport,
I got caught in traffic
and ended up being late
for my flight.
I had to wait around
for five hours
to catch
the next available flight.
We will go over some basic captioning guidelines. The first basic convention in captioning
concerns the difference between how you represent on-screen and off-screen speakers. The