Television Requirements [was Re: Bugs and TT (was TT and subtitling)]

It is very important to make a distinction between what may be used during 
the authoring and distribution and what may get encoded in a final media 
whether it is a television signal or a DVD.

It is indeed a foregone conclusion that whatever TT specification comes out 
of here will not replace (certainly any time soon) the current US 
regulatory encoding for EIA-608 on NTSC and EIA-708 on ATSC.  However, what 
*is* important is that TT must be able to be translated into these emission 
formats, else it will not be used, even for authoring or distribution.  So, 
the *functional* requirements of EIA-708 should be an input to the 
requirements of this work, if indeed this group wishes to meet the needs of 
television authoring and distribution for captioning.

Subtitling in the US television emission is non-existent.  However, Digital 
Cinema and DVD do and, like television, have different encodings in the 
final media.  In the US, in both cases are image files and no text at all.

So, looking at all the possible final media encodings will make one's head 
spin and a common design may be impossible.

It is my view that this group would best serve the world by focusing on a 
solid authoring and maybe distribution format only.  To the extent the work 
may be adopted for final media encoding should be left to others.  Of 
course, making it easy to do this on one media, such as the Internet, may 
be a reasonable goal (but not a requirement).

My 2 cents....

Regards,

         Mike

At 08:48 AM 2/6/2003 -0500, Joe Clark wrote:
At 09:41 AM 2/3/2003 +0000, Johnb@screen.subtitling.com wrote:

>>         Personally I feel that in most cases the cause is lost for 
>> existing **emission systems** (e.g. TV, DAB, DVD) adopting TT.
>
>Not at the authoring level and at a level midway between authoring and 
>emission.
>
>Case in point: I know one broadcaster that has the idea (not a very solid 
>one, in my view) of converting all subtitling and even closed captioning 
>to Microsoft Word files (!) that are simply pushed through at airtime, 
>rather comparable to live-display captioning.
>
>At the authoring level, we're dealing with timed text all the time. What 
>else do captioners and subtitlers deal with?
>
>>         Certainly if TT were to be adopted for subtitling for our 
>> purposes it would need a parallel or extension mechanism to carry timed 
>> graphic data.
>
>Or simply *refer* to it and call it up (and dismiss it, etc.) at 
>predetermined times.

-----------------------------------------------------
Michael A. Dolan  TerraByte Technology    (619)445-9070
PO Box 1673 Alpine, CA 91903 USA  FAX: (208)545-6564
URL:http://www.tbt.com

Received on Friday, 7 February 2003 11:00:41 UTC