On 6/4/08, Etienne Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 10:55 AM, Brian Butterworth > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > What I was saying was that the old Freeview version of BBC Parliament used > > to have a quarter-screen picture and the information that is now in the > > Astons was provided using MHEG5. This was clear text (to keep the bandwidth > > down) not bitmap graphics. > > Forgive my ignorance, but what is an Aston? Aston Broadcast Systems made a rather popular line of TV caption generating equipment - what are sometimes known as 'lower third graphics' are frequently referred to in the UK generically as Astons.
> > OCRing is never going to be brilliant, given the semi-transparent nature of > > the captions on BBC Parliament. > > > > However, a clear text feed of the data would keep the data pure, surely? > > The machines that put the captions up on the screen have internal > text-based logs, to which we have access. However, since this is > basically just pulling logfiles off a set of operational machines this > access isn't 100% reliable. The data in the log files is of variable > quality, since there are some speeches that are not captioned, and > other times captions aren't actually speeches (e.g. reaction shot of > previous speaker during a long speech can prompt a back and forth of > captions, even though the same person is speaking throughout the > changeover in captions). So although we use the logfiles to get an > approximate fix, we had to resort to the timestamping game for > accuracy. Likewise, the caption may not appear as soon as the speaker does - a friend of mine spent a most of a summer in a BBC Parliament transmission gallery, captioning House of Lords coverage in real time. It took while, but she got quite good at recognising peers by their beards. - martin - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
