The amount of video content people watch has increased. This growth has also boosted the demand for accurate and high-quality captions that make video content more accessible and engaging for the audience.
Whether you are a caption vendor or focus on digital media production, manual caption QC for video content is a cumbersome task. It needs review, identification, and correction, which takes time and resources – resources often needed elsewhere.
Can you streamline this outdated process? This article explains how, but first, what exactly are high-quality captions?
What is Caption QC?
High-quality captions should be readable, consistent in style, and free of spelling errors or typos. They should accurately represent audio content and meet the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) guidelines.
Traditionally, it involves reviewing the video content and captions, identifying where the captions do not meet usability requirements, platform-specific requirements or legal standards, and correcting them. The operator then exports the new corrected captions in the required format.
A High Effort Task
Caption QC ensures that captions help create a great viewer experience. However, manually checking and fixing errors in video captions can take hours. It can also tie up your resources in low-value tasks, choking your workflow.
Audio transcription tools can quickly produce captions. However, you must still verify if these comply with strict caption regulations.
Also, checking captions for different languages and content types can bloat your workflow. With multilingual content for different geographies and content adapted for different screen sizes, there would probably be hundreds of files to check. Imagine working through all these files manually. That sounds inefficient!
Automated Caption QC
Caption QC tools eliminate the need for reviewers to watch the entire video manually to identify errors. Automated systems detect and present identified issues in an intuitive and user-friendly interface for the reviewer to fix.
But it’s not just in identifying issues. Advanced caption QC tools also automatically correct recurring issues to streamline more parts of your captioning workflow.
What Challenges Can Automated Caption QC Tools Solve?
Modern video content needs captions for different languages and screen sizes. Because of the amount of content to work through, oversight and errors in caption files are common. Without a captioning QC process, captions may fail to meet format, platform, or legal requirements.
Automated caption QC tools identify and quickly address common challenges in the captioning workflow.
Caption-audio Sync Issues
Editing video content to fit platform or country-specific requirements can cause sync errors between the audio and captions.
Advanced caption QC tools can automatically identify and align the captions with the audio of the modified file.
Burnt-in-text Overlap
Captions can often cover burnt-in text that is part of the video content. Automated caption QC tools can check the content and report on these instances. This capability lets operators seamlessly reposition the captions, helping improve the viewer experience.
Timing Errors
Caption QC tools can also identify and fix common caption timing issues. Subtitle speed or characters per second (CPS), the gap between captions, characters per line (CPL), and words per minute (WPM) are some of the issues that these tools can automatically fix.
Validation of Standards Compliance
One of the tasks that can clog your captioning workflows is validating whether the captions meet compliance standards.
This task becomes even more complex because of the different specifications that OTT content platforms demand (like vetting profanity and spelling). Caption QC tools can do this instantly and present detailed reports of specific instances needing correction.
Cloud-native Workflows
Media workflows are rapidly migrating to the Cloud, allowing collaboration among different teams and efficient delivery. There is an obvious time advantage to an automatic caption quality check in the Cloud, without downloading and reviewing the content manually.
A native-cloud solution can also scale up and down seamlessly according to the content volume you must handle.
A More Efficient Workflow
Captioning workflows can quickly snowball and become unwieldy. Using automated caption QC tools can make it more efficient, saving you hundreds of work hours and ensuring faster delivery times. And with modern cloud economics, you only pay for what you use without committing to large monthly or annual contracts. This flexibility and efficiency are the reasons caption QC tools are critical to captioning workflows.
