The presence of captions and subtitles with digital media files has become more prominent and nearly universal. We often see content creators and distributors contemplate the difference between a Caption Authoring system and a Caption/Subtitle QC system and whether they are both needed. So, we thought it is worthwhile to clarify and differentiate the role each software category provides.

Caption/Subtitle Authoring and Caption/Subtitle QC remain two separate and distinct activities. While caption authoring is used to create captions and subtitles, caption QC is an increasingly important part of any caption/subtitle workflow in order to ensure the optimum end-user experience when viewing captions. The caption QC until recently, had remained a time-consuming and resource intensive manual process. The advent of advanced and automated caption QC software, such as CapMate from Venera Technologies, is now providing a logical alternative to the tedious manual caption QC process, allowing automation of a large portion of this process.

To further clarify and differentiate between caption authoring tools and caption QC tools, we will examine some scenarios to help you appreciate the importance of specialized caption QC systems.

Caption/Subtitle QC vs. Authoring

GOP or “Group of Pictures” is a term that refers to the video structure representing how digital video is grouped. But before we get into understanding GOP, let’s start with the basics of the video structure. When a video is encoded to be viewed on television or by any streaming platform, it’s important that it is compressed. In order to more easily transmit digital media, video compression is used to turn large raw video files into smaller video files that can transmit more easily over limited bandwidth. Video compression works by locating and reducing redundancies within an image or a sequence of images. A video is composed of a sequence of frames displayed at a given frequency. In most common video content, each frame is very similar to those that precede and follow it. Though there might be lots of movement in the subject of the content, the background and a large portion of the image is usually the same or very similar from frame to frame.

GOP Podcast

Automate and expedite the QC of Audio, Video, and Caption/Subtitle assets with our on-premise and cloud native QC solutions. Our customers include large studios, broadcasters, or OTT service provider to Post Production houses and smaller boutique media processing entities.

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