Friday, November 17, 2006
Only $60 to Closed Caption for 30 Min? You've Got to Be Kidding!
But I'm not kidding. It IS indeed possible to closed caption for a church for only $60 for 30 minutes, and even I didn't know that! I didn't know that until I came across this letter from Aberdeen Captioning in the FCC online comment files. I don't know how they do it for so little, and I am posting this at the risk of making Aberdeen Captioning's phone line ring off the hook.
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4 comments:
Way to go! This is indeed a great news and now start sharing that information to all religion broadcasters.
$60 for 30 minutes is no brainier and broadcasters cannot scream "Undue Burden" on this one.
Hands waving in the air!
DeafLinux
I have no faith with that company. They blatantly refused to participate in a homeland security grant for captioning emergency preparedness videos.
It seems a bit too good to believe. The economics of the offer don't sound right.
Let's give the benefit of the doubt and assume there's no background noise in the audio, the speaker never wanders from the microphone, the speaker never goes much above 250 words per minute, and the system is trained well enough to recognize the sole speaker's voice.
10 min for a raw transcript -- A raw transcript by voice recognition would cost 10 minutes of operator time to get the audio from the client, load it into the system and unload the raw data.
30 minutes to read through and correct any gross errors. Can you imagine what voice recognition will do to some biblical names?
0 minutes to add captions to the video. We'll assume all that's made is a file and the client has to use it to actually stick the captions in the video.
30 minutes to preview the captions -- It would make sense to at least take one look at the whole job!
10 minutes for any last minute changes -- Fix gross things like captions flashing by at an unreadable 300 words a minute or appearing in just the wrong place.
In the end you have a so-so quickie captioning job. The spelling on most names won't be researched. The captions will just roll by crudely synchronized with the speech, or lurching along in blind synchrony with the speech.
The captioner will have spent nearly an hour and a half for that $60. Out of that $60 comes all the captioner's expenses. Taxes, rent, interest on loans, heat, electricity, water, health insurance, equipment costs, billing costs, bill collection costs, advertising, sales, marketing, and even an Internet connection.
I don't know if this sort of quickie captioning makes either a good product (bad captions are off-putting) or economic sense.
Emergency broadcasting is difficult too. Someone must be available 24/7, all the work is unscheduled, turn-around must be immediate, and sometimes a single job lasts for 24 hours or longer(storms and earthquakes for example). There is also a lot of paperwork and legal review when working with a government agency.
But maybe the work can be done in India, Jamaica, China, or Africa where, at the moment, living standards are much lower for even the literate English speakers.
I'd still think it's too good to be true.
Pat Ampulla
My bad, I was thinking in terms of post production (off-line) captioning.
The $60 was for 30 minutes of real-time captioning.
With real-time, the total time invested for a half hour event can be as little as 35 minutes.
I imagine there still is a good bit of name mangling though.
Pat
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