Closed Captioning

Types of Captioning

Subtitling

Most Captioning Is Closed

Closed captioning is most common because it's required by law in the United States.  It's also the most inflexible form of captioning.

The features of traditional closed captioning are:

• Monospaced characters
• Limited set of characters
• Viewer's TV decoder draws characters on the screen
• Viewer can turn captions on and off
• Black background
• 32 characters per line
• 15 lines in image area (safe title)

Viewers can select from four channels of closed captioning.  English captions on one channel, for example, Spanish captions on another, French on a third, and so forth.

But traditional closed captioning has very limited foreign language support.  Some accented characters used in French or Spanish aren't available.

Closed captions are quite readable, though.  Which explains why they're so popular even among fully hearing people in gyms, waiting rooms, airports and in taverns.

AutoCaption has a full range of tools for closed captioning.  What's even more important is that AutoCaption lets you can switch easily from closed captioning to subtitling projects and back again.

Yes, AutoCaption will make closed caption assets for DVD authoring packages.

Captions are said to be closed when special electronics are necessary to make the captions visible.  This distinction is becoming blurred because DVD players let the user select from 32 channels of otherwise invisible subtitling.  Ironically, most DVD players will not decode traditional closed captions.