Closed Caption In DV Capture?

I have a DVCAM tape quot;firewirequot; captured with Premiere Pro. I was told the Sub Master has quot;closed captioningquot; on it. Checked it out on a capable TV and it doesn't register. The guy insists it's on the DigiBeta Master that was copied to DVCAM and given to me.

When capturing a tape with closed captioning is it still in the AVI for extraction?

I have to author this video with the CC.

DVCAM will hold CC data, but it's not on line 21 of the signal.  The CC data from line 21 is removed and converted to a digital form, and then written in the DV datastream as metadata.  On DVCAM playback, the metadata is supposed to be read out of the DV datastream and re-encoded on line 21 for analog output.

This only happens if the DVCAM decks being used properly handle the closed captioning.  Some decks do, some decks don't.  See Adam Wilt's DV Page for some details.

At any rate, you could be losing the captions in several places:

- DigiBeta master actually didn't have captions on it (not likely, since your source says they're on there).
- DVCAM recording deck didn't write CC data into the DV stream.
- DVCAM deck you're playing the tape back on doesn't read CC data.

Now, even if the CC data is on the DVCAM and your deck processes it, I know of no DV capture applications for the PC that will write the CC data into a file.  This is going to be your major problem -- how to get the CC data into the computer.  Unfortunately, I don't have any suggestions for you.

I think I can write a tool to extract the closed captions, so you can burn them into the video, convert to subtitles, or include as DVD closed captions.  The catch is that I don't have all of the documentation for how the DV format stores them (I don't suppose the DV spec is available for download anywhere?).  The book Video Demystified said that they were in the VAUX region, but gave me little more than that to work with.  Perhaps if you put a sample of your video up somewhere where I can download it I can try and see what I can do.

SomeJoe ... Thanks for the info on DVCAM and CC. Looks like my DVCAM player doesn't decode the CC with the line out.

McPoodle ... My client just sent me the original caption files. They have a .PAS extension and were developed with CCWriter (old DOS version.) Will your RAW2CC utlity work? I tried and it doesn't seem so. Unless I'm doing something wrong. If you like I could email them to you to check out. They do open up in Wordpad.

Thanks