Re: Roll-up captions in WebVTT

On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 1:05 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
> 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).

I've seen it in some Karaoke videos, but never with actual captions.
And to be honest, I found the need to have my eyes jump first down a
line to read the next, then up a line to read the next etc much worse
for reading than others where the lines move. In the first case my
eyes have to continuously re-focus on alternative lines above and
below, whereas in the second case my eyes will focus on what I am
reading and move with the text motion, then jump down a line (which is
a movement they are used to from normal reading).

Here is an example Karaoke video where the text moves:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsVQbwQHPjg . I've seen both effects
used in Karaoke. I've admittedly only ever seen the scrolling effect
used for captions.

I don't even want to go into the credits use case, since we don't
actually have an explicit kind of credits, though it might be an idea
to add this. It would certainly be nice to be able to index the text
of credits better than is possible now. But I don't think it has much
influence on whether or not we need scrolling captions.

It is probably true that for certain content you do want to avoid
scrolling captions. For example this user complains that he doesn't
like scrolling cations on movies
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi_VQ-4Yn4Y) mainly because they don't
actually tell you who is speaking because of the lack of placement of
the captions underneath the speaker. But he also says he doesn't mind
them for sports and news because it's clear who is talking.

My argument is that there are situations where scrolling captions are
needed and they are not necessarily rare or worse for everyone to
watch. It's a different presentation that some prefer and others
don't. Therefore we should have a standard means of doing them rather
than having to do awkward text copying to simulate the effect (and
screw up all useful automated analysis of the text).

Regards,
Silvia.

Received on Sunday, 18 December 2011 08:08:32 UTC