Incorrect closed captions in movies.

[Chip Chester]

jimbofish wrote: "Our local news station often has the captions ahead of the actual supposedly live audio and video, sometimes by 10 to 20 seconds."

Since the introduction of HD broadcasts, the signal path of caption data is no longer linked directly to the signal path of the video. Data is harvested and re-encoded, often taking a path around frame synchs, encoders, etc. all of which can have encode and decode video delays. Then, for satellite "locals", the data is recovered from the terrestrial broadcast signal and sent via fiber (usually) to the sat uplink facility, where it is further compressed to the bandwidth desired by the sat provider, and the caption data (which arrives from the "local" in a separate data channel on that fiber,) is re-inserted after all the compression passes (because the data doesn't take kindly to compression.) So, timing is a crapshoot, and not a lot of particular attention is paid to it.

It could also be that the remote live captioner is watching off satellite, so they're behind even before they start. (DirecTV's processing delay is a full 9 seconds behind local terrestrial broadcast in our neighborhood.)

I do one program that takes much the same path as outlined above. I also have complete access to the editorial encoding and the "master control" chain before transmission to the private, dedicated downlink receivers at each affiliate station. Even with that level of access and control, the captions don't always come out with the timing I authored them with. Processing within the affiliate stations, and in the consumer satellite re-broadcast system can move 'em around a bit.

Amazing Race may have a pretty quick turnaround that requires encoding on playback, even though it's pre-recorded and edited. The timing will rely on what point in the chain monitoring takes place.

CC errors (in HD programming) are usually the result of running captions thru additional (data) compression after encoding, or more frequently, because of time compression -- in order to sell more spots.

Plus I fibbed a little about the soapbox thing.

Chip