Tips for Post-Production and Live Captioning

Post-Production Captioning

It is very helpful to have a transcript when creating post-production captions if the transcript can be uploaded and auto-timed (as with YouTube captioning).

If a 3rd-party vendor creates captions, be sure to review those captions before distributing the video. Even diligent captioners can make mistakes or misinterpret specialized terminology or names.

While auto-captions are not sufficient on their own, they can provide a good first pass when creating captions. Once auto-captions are available, they can be edited and fine-tuned to create a fully accessible video.

Live Captioning

If an event is scripted, a captionist can pre-program the script to have it shown line by line during the event. If the speaker goes off-script, however, the captions will not match the audio. If there is a chance a speaker will go off-script, it might be better to let the captionist provide live captions instead of working directly from a script.

3rd-party captionists will often request material they can use to prepare for live captioning events. Contextual information, speaker names, and specialized vocabulary are all helpful so a captionist can familiarize themselves with the content of the event and pre-program names and terminology into their captioning dictionaries.

Vendors IC Has Used in the Past

3Play Media can provide post-production captioning and audio description. Work is done through a contract. Rates are discounted with high-volume pre-purchase of hours. 3Play Media is not the least expensive option but they provide high quality captions and are the only company IC uses at this time that provides audio description.

REV can provide low-cost post-production captions. They offer quick turnaround times.

Verbit provides post-production captions but requires a contract and pre-purchasing hours. Turnaround time is relatively fast.

Verbit also provides live captions either using ASR only or ASR with a human reviewer.

  • The live captions are not currently recommended by SAS.

ACS (Alternative Communication Services) provides live captioning services by highly trained, human CART service providers.  Service is invoiced on a weekly basis.

Additional Resources