Link your HyperCaster to your TelVue Connect account to use available SmartCaption automatic closed captioning for HyperCaster Live & Offline captioning. HyperCaster Live captioning requires SmartCaption LIVE channel licenses compatible with AIO, B100-SDI/ANA, and ProVue models, and an Internet connection for your HyperCaster to communicate securely with Connect. SmartCaption’s usage-based pricing saves you considerable money allowing you to designate which Series, Live Sources, and Files are captioned, or limit captioning to unique programming hours. Program-specific Custom Language Models makes it easy to improve caption accuracy for your meetings and programs. Set-and-forget automation rules right in your HyperCaster makes captioning 100% automated. Uploading to Connect from your HyperCaster publishes generated captions for CloudCast streaming, mobile, OTT, and Media Exchange. Contact sales@telvue.com to get setup with SmartCaption and SmartCaption LIVE.
To get started, first link your HyperCaster to your TelVue Connect account by adding a Connect Remote Server with your Connect account credentials. The HyperCaster will recognize if you have SmartCaption captioning enabled in TelVue Connect, and will present additional automatic captioning features. The HyperCaster will synchronize your default captioning settings from Connect, and you can change the HyperCaster defaults in the Captioning Configuration. For offline file-based captioning, automatically generated captions are stored as WebVTT sidecar files and will display during playback if you enable the Embed Captions? option on a channel for supported models. For live event captioning, additionally enable the SmartCaption LIVE? channel option. Embedded offline and live captioning is output as standard 608/708 captioning on SDI and IP outputs. HyperCaster SmartCaption captioning usage minutes for Live & Offline is registered back to your TelVue Connect account. TelVue Connect can be configured to send email alerts when available captioning minutes dips below a configurable threshold.
Offline Captioning
For offline file captioning, you will see a new file action available to Generate Closed Captions.
Selecting the Generate Closed Captions action will present Caption Generation Options initially set to your defaults.
The Caption Generation Options are as follows:
- Source Language: Identify the spoken language in the programming.
- Use Smart Formatting?: If selected, converts dates, times, series of digits and numbers, phone numbers, currency values, and internet addresses into more readable, conventional representations in the final transcript. Also converts certain keyword strings to punctuation symbols.
- User Profanity Filter?: If selected, filters profanity from all output except for keyword results by replacing inappropriate words with a series of asterisks. Uncheck the box to return results with no censoring.
- Custom Language Model: Optionally select a custom language model to be used when automatically generating captions. Custom Language Models are created and managed in TelVue Connect, and the HyperCaster automatically syncs the available models.
- Customization Weight: The customization weight tells us how much weight to give to words from the custom language model compared to those from the standard dictionary. 0.3 is the default and recommended setting. Higher values favor the custom model.
Click the Caption button to begin automatic captioning. The Task Tab will show a task for the caption generation background job. When the task is complete, the captions are attached as a sidecar WebVTT file viewable in the show content Captions tab and the content thumbnail will show the CC icon indicating captions are present.
The show content Captions tab displays the automatically generated sidecar captions. The captions can be viewed or downloaded as WebVTT. Content previews will show the captions if you enable captions in the preview player’s control bar via the CC button. If you trim the content, caption playback will honor the trim points as well to keep everything in sync.
For automatic offline captioning of specific programming, organize your programming into Series, enable the Caption? option for the series and select the desired caption settings in the Captioning section including any program-specific Custom Language Models. All Episodes added to the series will be automatically captioned in the background so captions will display on scheduled playout and replays.
Live Captioning
For automatic live captioning of specific programming, designate specific live series and live sources to be automatically captioned.
For Series, enable the Caption? option for the series and select the desired caption settings in the Captioning section including any program-specific Custom Language Models. All live events for that series will be automatically captioned on channels with SmartCaption LIVE enabled.
For live sources including Feeds (Live Streams & NDI), Inputs (AIO SDI Inputs), and Switch Inputs, enable the Caption? option in the corresponding source configuration and select the desired caption settings in the Captioning section including any source-specific Custom Language Models. All live events for those sources will be automatically captioned on channels with SmartCaption LIVE enabled. If a live source designated for captioning is used in a series, the series caption settings will override. When captioned live events are both played-out and recorded, the live captioning is saved and automatically associated with the recording for future replays. Live events that are only recorded can be offline captioned after the recording completes, either manually, or automatically as part of a Series configured for captioning.
Dashboard Channel Confidence Monitoring and Previewing will show captions from both uploaded and generated sidecar captions and native 608/708 captions if you enable captions in the player’s control bar via the CC button.
Publishing to Connect & CloudCast
Uploading content to Connect with SmartCaption automatically generated captions will upload the caption file along with the video. The caption file will be attached to the Connect media record and is available in Connect for all supported workflows including CloudCast Streaming, Mobile & OTT, multi-language Caption Translation, and embedding as 608/708 during cloud transcoding for Broadcast & Media Exchange.
