Subtitles play a crucial role in making media more accessible to a broader audience; however, ensuring they are ready for consumption can be a tedious and time-consuming task. And as the number of delivery endpoints (with their own unique requirements) grows, ensuring compliance across those endpoints becomes more complex. Operators must pay special attention to specifics such as reading speed limits, text positioning, event gap durations, and more. The good news is that Rally and the providers available in the Application Services Market can streamline this process.
With Rally, source captions can be run first through an automated QC provider, such as Closed Caption Converter, Baton Captions, or Telestream Qualify, which inspects the captions for any issues, generates a report detailing those issues, and can be tailored to meet the destination’s requirements. The report, also known as time-based metadata (TBMD), can then be utilized throughout the rest of the supply chain to inform decisions on next steps. If errors are discovered, an Edit task is created automatically and assigned to the group responsible for the work.
Rally can also be used to streamline subtitle editing. TBMD can be imported into a Rally Access application such as Accurate.Video Subtitle and, from that report, markers are imported onto the timeline that indicate where errors or issues occur. Operators can now go directly to the points requiring attention, rather than wasting time hunting for errors.
Accurate.Video Subtitle is also equipped with tools that make the act of subtitle editing much simpler. Those include bulk repositioning or re-timing, a search and replace feature for potentially misspelled words or explicit language (which can be highlighted via additional TBMD markers), and more.
Once edits are completed, the corrected subtitles are exported, continuing through the supply chain where they are available for downstream processes, including the final delivery.
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Reach out if you want to learn more about how Rally can help make your subtitling workflows more efficient.
