User`s guide

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2. Roll-up captioning is available for 2, 3 or 4 lines of captioning. When you choose any
one of these modes, you will see a maximum of 2, 3 or 4 lines of text on the video
monitor. It is very important to note that in the Video Window of MacCaption, the
Roll-up mode does not appear to be a smooth roll up;
3. If there is more than one person on the video screen, to distinguish the speakers, you
should use the following technique. Use the symbol
this is due to technical reasons,
which we will not go into. But rest assured, when the video is encoded, the resulting
captions will appear as standard Roll-up captions.
> for the first person and
>> for the second person
> for the third person (if exists) or for the first person.
The idea is use of > and >> alternatively distinguishes one speaker from the other.
> SPEAKER ONE TALKING
SPEAKER ONE STILL TALKING
SPEAKER ONE STILL TALKING
SPEAK ONE STILL TALKING
>> SPEAKER TWO TALKING
SPEAKER TWO STILL TALKING
> BACK TO SPEAKER ONE
SPEAKER ONE STILL TALKING
>> SPEAKER THREE TALKING
Now you know why we chose 29 as the maximum number of characters per line. If there
are more than one speakers in the video, you would need to 3 characters ‘>> ’. If there is
only one speaker, you may use 32 characters per line.
4. Keep in mind that the maximum number of characters you can fit in one line is 32. So if
you have an indentation of 4 characters (horizontal position = 5), and want to put one or
two > symbols to indicate a change of speakers, you should import the original text file
with no more than 25 ( = 32 – 4 – 3) characters per row.
To clear captioning from the screen when there is no one speaking for more than 3 seconds or so,
you can clear the captions by inserting blank a row.
Suggested Styles and Conventions
Caption Media Program (National Association of Deaf) has created a style guide, which is
available from www.cpcweb.com/download/CaptionKey.pdf.
This is a very helpful guide to understand the styles and conventions used to caption a video. We
strongly encourage you to read this document before producing captioned video.