Hi, I am mildly bi-lingual. I speak English and some Spanish. For machine languages, I know BASIC (circa Apple IIc). For visual programming, I’ve learned XML.
I’d like to become fluent in the caption format language used in the de facto caption format, Scenarist Closed Captions (SCC). SCC language is written in hexadecimal codes.
I’m not a native speaker of hexadecimal. I grew up speaking decimal and had a little exposure to binary in high school and college.
I may be too old to learn to speak hexadecimal SCC as smoothly as a native caption encoder or caption decoder unit does, but that won’t stop me from slowly deciphering a few codes here and there. The decreased plasticity in my adult brain is why I believe that schools should teach children to read HEX at a young age when their brains are like a sponge that easily soaks up knowledge.
Here’s what my internal hex reader has learned to decode so far.
FORMAT CODES AT THE START OF EACH CAPTION LINE:
PAINT-ON FORMAT
01:00:03;14 942c 9429 94f4 4920 6170 70f2 e5e3 e961 f4e5 20e9 f4ae
942c 9429 at start of caption means “paint-on” format
SCC Paint-on captions have no format code at the end of the line.
POP-ON FORMAT
01:00:03;01 9420 94f4 4920 6170 70f2 e5e3 e961 f4e5 20e9 f4ae 942c 8080 8080 942f
Ex: 01:00:00;17 942c 9429
9420 94f4 at start of caption and 942c 8080 8080 942f at the end of the caption mean “pop-on” format.
These days, 2-line pop-on is the most common format for pre-produced captions.
TIMECODE
DROPFRAME TIMECODE hh:mm:ss;ff
The semicolon ; before the frames indicates dropframe.
NONDROPFRAME TIMECODE hh:mm:ss:ff
The colon : before the frames indicates nondropframe.
I will post additional SCC codes some other time.
Here’s a quick shout-out of thanks to http://www.theneitherworld.com/mcpoodle/SCC_TOOLS/DOCS/SCC_FORMAT.HTML
the web site where I learned almost everything I know about the SCC format!
Yours verbatim,
Caption Breaker
“Captions: so hard to make; so easy to break.”
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