For the hearing-impaired, captioning is essential to access news, entertainment and information. Other groups who also benefit from captioning are second language learners, children learning to read and adults improving their literacy skills.
Closed captions can be hidden within normal television broadcasts, on videotape and DVDs. They require a built-in caption decoder or an external decoder to make them visible on the TV screen. Caption files are especially constructed to transcribe all aspects of a programme’s audio content - including song lyrics, sound effects, music cues and character identification.
The National Captioning Institute (NCI), ECI’s American parent company, is a world leader in closed captioning, both off-line and real-time. Having pioneered closed-captioning services in the 1970s, NCI also oversees the operations of ULTECH LLC, a Middlebury (Connecticut) company that develops and manufactures broadcast and post-production equipment for closed captioning, subtitling and data encoding.
With a dedicated team of captioners trained in access issues, this continues to be an important area of production for ECI. We can work in both PAL and NTSC formats and undertake the entire process of encoding the master tape or only create the caption file, allowing you to book the encoding at the facilities house of your choice. All you need to do is supply us with a master or VHS dub of your programme with BITC, VITC and LTC timecodes.
We offer closed-captioning services for all countries where decoders are commonly used.
To purchase the Video Reader VR20 which decodes closed captions on videos, contact Sarabec on +44 (0)1642 247789 (voice) or +44 (0)1642 251310 (minicom).