112 Saturday 14.09.13 theibcdaily
Data retained is efficiency gained Opinion
The industry needs to place greater value on subtitle preparation says Screen Systems business development director Andrew Lambourne
Subtitle preparation remains a challenged and challenging corner of the broadcast market. Governments are encouraging more access services subtitling – albeit less forcefully in some territories than others – while broadcasters renewing subtitling contracts are continuing to push downwards on price. Squeezed in the middle are
the subtitling service companies, and often crushed at the bottom are the freelancers hoping to earn a living from subtitle preparation and translation. With rising volumes but falling prices, the supply chain has to work harder, faster and cheaper to survive. The staggering disparity
between the cost of creating broadcast content (hundreds of thousands of euros) and the budget for subtitling (the low hundreds of euros) still puzzles many people, given the potential for access services or translation subtitles to deliver substantially larger audiences. Have subtitling companies over-competed and almost
destroyed their market? Survival of the fittest may
drive the industry towards the over-monopolistic dominance of a few big suppliers with such tight cost controls that the lifeblood is in danger of being squeezed from the profession. Automation has a part to
play, and Screen actively monitors the state-of-the-art in automatic speech recognition in particular. Whilst high quality can be delivered by trained re- speakers armed with tools such as Screen’s new Vocabulary Finder that seeks out names of people and places in the news, it remains the case that recognition direct from studio talent, or from a media file delivers disappointing results. This is hardly surprising given
the variability of speakers, accents, clarity and speed, and also the predilection for obscuring the dialogue track with invasive music and effects. This particularly affects children’s cartoons, when of course subtitles for deaf children are of exceptional value in motivating such
children to read. Real leverage could be
obtained from automated speech recognition higher up the production chain, before music and effects have been added. There are other potential benefits of considering the metadata required for subtitling earlier in the production cycle. It seems odd, for example,
that a subtitler should have to spend time researching lyrics of songs, spellings of names or content of unclear dialogue when all this is known at the production stage. It is bizarre that post production scripts are often not accessible to subtitlers, or are formatted in an inaccessible way. Screen has created a Script Extractor tool to access the valuable payload from more or less any script layout, but this is solving a problem that should not exist. I believe that the industry
would benefit from taking a fresh and joined-up view of the information value chain during content production including subtitling. Metadata is all the rage – yet people are adding it post-hoc. Wrappers such as
Andrew Lambourne: ‘A fresh and joined-up view’
DFXP enable the preservation of metadata for use later in the production chain. Screen participates in the
Eurostars S3DTV project for precisely that purpose: can metadata about 3D depth of field and disparity be folded into the content essence right from point of shooting, and be useful later in the chain to assist post production and subtitle depth placement? Preserving information can pay dividends in a competitive environment. 1.C49
PocketProbe for Android Bridge Technologies
By Ian McMurray Launched just before the RAI opened its doors to IBC visitors, PocketProbe for Android from Bridge Technologies
complements the iOS version of its remote monitoring app. Featuring Bridge Technologies’ second-generation OTT Engine,it is said to deliver digital media monitoring and analysis capability right to the engineer’s pocket. Expanding its compatibility with popular formats, PocketProbe now provides analysis of HLS, Smoothstream, RTMP and MPEG-DASH streams, with at-a-glance displays that present data through graphic displays and multiple overlays.
“The combination of full compatibility with any standard of streaming, and the power and clarity of the status and analysis tools, make PocketProbe a phenomenal decision-making tool for busy engineers on the move,” said Simen Frostad, chairman of Bridge Technologies. “PocketProbe epitomises our
approach to monitoring capability, which we believe should be ubiquitous and completely transparent, allowing the engineer to analyse every point in the network, at any time, in any depth of detail, and from any location.” PocketProbe contains the same OTT Engine found in Bridgetech’s VB1, VB2 and 10G VB3 series digital media monitoring probes, enabling confidence validation and analysis of HTTP-adaptive bitrate streams using the same metrics. PocketProbe can be used by service engineers and operational staff to test real world behaviours with a wide range of operators, while accurate status of bitrates used and profile changes is displayed in realtime, giving an understanding of provider delivery capability. 1.A30
Afford probe: PocketProbe delivers digital media monitoring and analysis capability right to the engineer’s pocket
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132