Re: Sonic Scenarist BD 5.1.3
Roan Distilo
This may be a an obvious thing that I've missed and I've searched the forum and done a google... (it's called due-diligence)... Would be nice to be able to display all clips in a project so I can make sure that all relevant clips have proxies generated and attached... I've been brought in to wrangle a large pre-existing documentary project and would be useful to easily check this... instead of opening every bin. I've created a metadata display preset so all I'm seeing is the proxy field (so I've at least figured that part out). Thinking maybe that there's a way to make this work using the "new search bin" command... Would be great if I could walk in to the client's tomorrow with the solution rather than have to figure it out in front of him... (I do like to be the smartest guy in the room or at least give that impression).
Thanks as always and can't say this enough: This is an amazing resource. In the process of authoring a complicated DVD project in Scenarist which has horrible documentation and almost non-existant support at a monthly rate that is disgusting... Oh, for a scenarist support forum...
The quickest way that I can think of is to show Proxy (or Proxy Status) in the Metadata Display of the Project tab and then go into List View and expand all Bins and all sub-Bins. On a large project, you'll have to scroll for a little bit, but it avoids having to setup the Metadata Display at the Bin level. As a double-check, the Find dialog box can be used in List View in the Project tab. It only finds things one at a time, but collapsed Bins will expand to show the Find results.
A very quick way to answer "Is there a Proxy for this shot?" is to have used the "Add Watermark" check box when creating proxies in first place - of course, that requires the person you're taking over for to have done it.
Sonic Scenarist... now there's a DVD authoring solution that I have not thought about for a very long time. Once upon a time, I owned a license with two business partners. Back in the days of America Online, there was a DVD user group based out of Burbank, California... there are names of people I thought I'd never forget that I a forgetting right now.
Line 21 Closed Captions is the system used by North American televisionstations to encode information useful to the deaf and the hard of hearing in aformat that can be turned on or off by the viewer (a page on theTeletext Then and Now site shows what this actually looks like, for those ofyou from PAL or SECAM-broadcasting countries). There are a handful ofalternate formats for this purpose used by TV broadcasters in other parts ofthe world, but only Line 21 Closed Captions are supported for DVD's,so all non-Region 1 discs claiming to include "Captions for the Deaf and Hardof Hearing" actually use subtitles instead (the short difference betweensubtitles and closed captions: you turn subtitles on and off with your DVDremote, and you turn closed captions on and off with your TV remote). Thefollowing explanation is derived from the Closed Caption FAQ, maintained by PaulRobson, which does an excellent job of explaining what Line 21 Closed Captionsare and how they work in a broadcast setting.
The mechanism used for Line 21 Closed Captions allows the viewer to choosebetween a maximum of four different "channels" of simultaneous captions, plusfour more "channels" of non-program related text. In the years since theintroduction of this system, it was discovered that channels CC1, CC2, and T1(the first and second closed-caption channels and the first text channel) werethe only ones broadcasters ever used, so alternate uses were found for two ofthe remaining channels. Channel T2 is now used to transmit Interactive TV(ITV) signals, which are used by MSN-TV to transmit the internet links for theirservice. Channel CC3 is now used to transmit the eXtended Data Service (XDS).XDS contains a wide variety of information, but the two portions most commonlyused are the time of day signal which newer VCR's use to program their clocks,and the rating signal which is used to control what content children areallowed to watch via the "V-Chip"s in newer TV's.
Line 21 Closed Captions are transmitted on the last odd and even lines inthe Vertical Broadcast Interval (VBI), the non-visible part of the TV signalused mostly for calibration purposes. If you adjust the vertical hold on aNorth American television set, you should be able to see one or two lines abovethe normal "top" of the screen, each made up of sixteen rapidly-blinkingsegments. These are Fields 1 and 2 of Scanline 21. Each segment of each lineis used as a bit to build up a total of four eight-bit bytes, two bytes in theodd field and two bytes in the even field. Field 1 is used to transmitchannels CC1, CC2, T1 and T2 (ITV), while Field 2 is used to transmit channelsCC3 (XDS), CC4, T3 and T4.
One of the major benefits of the Line 21 Closed Caption system is that it isautomatically recorded with the program when taped by a VCR and can then bedisplayed on playback. Since Digital Versatile Discs onlystore the visible portion of the video signal, an alternate method had to befound in order to transmit Closed Captions and their related services,especially since there is a legal requirement in the United States to provideClosed Captions on every movie sold in the country. For DVD's, this data ismuxed into the MPEG elementary video files in the form of a special user datapacket inside each GOP. As far as I know, every DVD authoring program thatsupports Closed Captions (including Scenarist and Maestro) import them as oneor two text files (one for Field 1, the other for Field 2) containing the rawhexidecimal data rather than expect them to already be muxed into the videosource files. I have never heard of a DVD that stored anything but closedcaptions in the user data packets (the DVD specification includes a superioralternative to the XDS ratings packet, PCFriendly is superior to ITV, and ofcourse XDS time of day is useless on a DVD), so the rest of this discussionwill focus on the Field 1 data and channels CC1 and CC2.
The file is double-spaced, with data lines alternating with blank lines.The first line identifies the format and version--it needs to be exactlylike this. The third and subsequent alternating lines start with thetimecode and are followed by the data.
The timecode is in SMPTE format, which is eitherhours:minutes:seconds:frames for non-dropframe timebase orhours:minutes:seconds;frames for dropframe timebase. Bothare 29.97 frames per second, but dropframe timebase accomplishes the fractionalframerate by using 30 frames per second and skipping the first two frames eachminute for nine out of every ten minutes (non-dropframe timebase simply runsthe clock at exactly 29.97 frames per second). Use the same format you encodedyour video with. Here's a hint: if it came from a broadcast source, it'sprobably dropframe, while if you created it from scratch, it's probablynon-dropframe.
The data is made up of two-byte hexidecimal words, separated from each otherby spaces and from the timecode by a tab character. The data uses only sevenout of every eight bits of each byte, with the high bit used to satisfy oddparity--adding up all the bits has to result in an odd number, or the closedcaption decoder will reject the byte as corrupt data. The major exception isITV, which not only doesn't enforce odd parity, it also uses a slightlydifferent character set than captions, text or XDS.
The full requirements for Closed Captions are contained in EIA/CEA standard608-B (there is also a 708-B standard for high-definition TV captions, but thatis beyond the scope of this document). CEA 608 can be purchased from IHS Global for $ 170, but luckily, therequirements are available for free in the Code of Federal Regulations, whichcan be obtained in PDF format from the GovernmentPrinting Office (just click "Browse" on the screen that comes up).Specifically, the requirements are contained in 47CFR15.119: book 47 coversthe Federal Communications Commission, section 15 covers broadcasting in radiofrequencies (including television), and 119 is the specific subsection foranalog closed caption decoder requirements. The main adjustment you need tomake to these requirements is for the odd parity: 00h (binary 00000000) istranslated to 80h (10000000), but 07h (00000111) is left alone.
As explained in the Closed Caption FAQ, there are three different types ofclosed captions: roll-up, paint-on, and pop-on. The only one of these used inDVD's are pop-on. The requirements also cover using CC1 and CC2 to puttwo different closed caption channels on the DVD, but none of the software DVDplayers can support CC2, so I'll only explain how to create pop-on captionsfor channel CC1.
Pop-on captions have a set format, as described below, made up of commands(always 2-byte words) and characters (usually single bytes). If the captionis to be broadcast, each of the commands are doubled up for redundancy incase the signal is garbled in transmission (garbled data is usually displayedas character 7f, the solid block). The decoder is programmed toignore a second command when it is the same as the first. When writing captionsfor a DVD, you can choose whether you wish to double or not (if you look at thesample towards the top of the page, you will see a lot of doubling).
CodeMeaning9120change to white, no formatting91a1change to white underline91a2change to green, no formatting9123change to green underline91a4change to blue, no formatting9125change to blue underline9126change to cyan, no formatting91a7change to cyan underline91a8change to red, no formatting9129change to red underline912achange to yellow, no formatting91abchange to yellow underline912cchange to magenta, not formatting91adchange to magenta underline91aeturn on italics912fturn on italics and underline94a8turn flash on
Data in MPEG files is organized in terms of packets. DVD closed captionsare stored on a per-GOP basis, and are located within the video MPEG-2 filebetween the GOP Header packet and the (I-frame) Picture Header packet.
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