Re: Roll-up captions in WebVTT

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 8:22 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:

> That has the sentence's phrases first A then B; then it becomes C then B,
> which is backward, isn't it?
>
> But maybe there is usually a way to do short captions such that text, once
> on-screen, never moves.
>

It's not backwards, but if you havn't seen it in realtime and don't know
what I'm talking about, the above description probably isn't enough.  Let
me know if you want a more detailed description (or I'll dig out an
example).

 Nonetheless, timed-text formats should be usable when movement occurs and
is needed;  credits rarely jump-scroll, in my experience.

>
Just as a data point, not an argument against scrolling credits: note that
credits that pop between one set and the next are very common.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPqOGM2qEeo

 I think timed-text formats are also used for other than captioning;
>  scrolling credits come to mind, for example.
>

(FYI, uses other than captions are supported, though that's described
elsewhere.  See: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/video.html#text-track-model)

Some translations do try to overlay transliterated credits on top of the
original credits, eg. for CJK names.  I've rarely seen it work well, since
you end up with two sets of credits on screen: the original credits, baked
into the video, and the transliterated credits on top (which may try to
cover up the original, or coexist, which competes with anything the credits
are over).

It would work better for content *designed* to have credit rolls done this
way, since they'd have no credits baked into the video at all.  It's an
interesting idea.

I have no idea if scrolling credit rolls and roll-up captions would
actually collapse into the same feature or not.  That would depend on how
they end up working.

-- 
Glenn Maynard