A 'Qu4ntum' Leap In Caption & Subtitle Preparation

Screen is at NAB again this year but this time they return with the ground-breaking subtitle preparation solution WinCAPS Qu4ntum.
NAB 2012 will be Screen’s first US exhibition since its acquisition of fellow broadcast technology company SysMedia and the first exposure of WinCAPS Qu4ntum at an American conference.
WinCAPS Qu4ntum delivers a significant step forwards in subtitle and captioning productivity. Featuring a brand new user interface designed to enable caption and subtitle timing to be assessed easily against the media timeline, the suite packs a host of power tools such as text-to-speech alignment in multiple languages, AI-based extraction of dialogue payload from scripts, and integration with speech recognition so dialogue can be respoken directly into the file to save time typing.
If a script is available, the Script Extractor can in just a few minutes filter the relevant dialogue elements from almost any document layout, along with timing information and speaker labels if available.
Various efficient subtitling workflows are supported by WinCAPS Qu4ntum, including keyboard origination with manual timecode capture or assisted timecoding where text language matches audio language; speech-based origination with automated text segmentation, again with the option of assisted timecoding; or import from script followed by assisted timecoding. Comprehensive checks on timing, presentation and proofing provide a sequence of “traffic lights” drawing attention to areas where correction may be necessary and helping to indicate how much effort could be needed to tidy up the file, so the user can focus attention on the most important issues if time is tight.
Integration with enterprise workflow management systems allows metadata (such as client, language, assigned user, and media id) to be incorporated directly into the project as the Qu4ntum client is launched. With Qu4ntum’s back-end Indexer also pre-processing media files for audio level, shot change and speech presence data at the point of ingest, this all significantly reduces the time spent before productive work can begin.
A back-end DataStore holds an enterprise-level, shared knowledgebase. Spellings of names and places relevant to a given series entered during the first episode are then available to anyone else working on that series for instance. Client templates are defined once and stored centrally, so that customer preferences are always correctly reflected when new work is undertaken. Grammar rules for different languages can be stored and used to control segmentation and formatting of scripts or transcripts into linguistically meaningful captions or subtitles.
Three different views of the “work in progress” allow users to focus on the caption or subtitle list, the timing relationship with the media file, and the text itself presented cleanly for proof-reading. Much of the benefit WinCAPS Qu4ntum brings is through the clean and innovative design, based on decades of experience in boosting productivity without sacrificing quality.
www.screensystems.tv
(LB)