Now Offering Accurate and Affordable AI-powered Captioning & Transcription

Each captioning company will categorize their levels of captioning differently, but a fully operating captioning company will offer at these three types of captioning: live captioning, live-to-tape captioning, and post-production captioning.

Here are descriptions of the different types of captioning:

Live Captioning

Just like it sounds, live captioning is written by a live captioner in real-time.  The live captioner is trained as a court reporter and uses a stenograph machine to caption live.  They do not type using a keyboard. The live captioner writes at the same time the show is being broadcasted. The live captioner dials in directly into a T.V. station.

Live-to-tape Captioning

This type of captioning is written by a live captioner in real-time. Instead of dialing into a station, they dial into an encoder and an audio line and write in the same “live” style.  The show is recorded in real-time, but is mailed out to the station and broadcasts on a later date.  This type of captioning is used mainly for extremely tight turnarounds and to reduce cost to the client.  The accuracy rate is much lower than post-production captioning.

Post-Production Captioning

Post-production captions typically get transcribed by a transcriber using a video and audio file that has been digitized.  Many transcribers work remotely (from home) or on location. Typically, a caption editor close captions this type of captioning.  Within post-production captioning, most companies will offer different levels of quality to meet the needs of their clients.

“That person doesn’t even know how to spell.”  “They can’t type correctly.”  “How come in today’s age of technology can’t they get the captions right?”  If you don’t know how captioning works, you’ve probably thought or said this yourself.  The captioner’s ability to spell and type is not usually the reason a viewer sees garbled captions.  So you ask yourself, “Why?”

The following are reasons why captions appear garbled:

• The most common is the combination of the quality of the video signal and the quality of the decoder chip in the television itself.  If the quality of either is poor, it will display words with missing letters, separate letters incorrectly or a miss a word entirely.

• The technology of encoders and decoders working together to reveal the captions properly

• When watching a live program, the captioner may mistroke resulting in a typo

• When watching a live program you may see a word spelled phonetically.  This happens when the captioner doesn’t have that particular word in their dictionary.   The more experience the writer has, the more words in their dictionary and typically better captioning results.

So the next time you view captioning, pass on the word as to “Why captions look garbled?”