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What do Australian captions look like?

According to my own plan cultivated for months, absolutely the first thing I did upon dropping my bags onto my hotel-room floor in Sydney was to turn on the television and then turn on captions. This would be my maiden voyage in the (down)underworld of PAL teletext captions, which the Brits and Australians keep lording over us as somehow superior.

They aren’t.

Now, what did I find?

Yellow-on-black text covering up onscreen graphics
Their real-time captions clobber Chyrons, too.
Yellow text leads wraps to a second line and then turns to white text
And they have this idea that the only thing we need to worry about is differentiating speakers, which they do by changing colour (here, second speaker back to first speaker).
Real-time captions in yellow
The newsreader (white captions, not shown) introduced the correspondent, who, as second speaker, is captioned in yellow. Supercrappy font, huh?
Two words in blue followed by two sentences in green, run together in two lines
Green sentence, single word of blue, then another green sentence
This British program (captioned in Scotland, according to the show’s end credits) uses colour as an indicator of speaker change. Tell me, my Scottish and Australian friends: Who is speaking?
Double quotation marks in a two-line caption are all closing double quotes, ”
Speaking of supercrappy fonts, don’t you love the quotation marks, all of which, single and double, are closing? That is, the only quotation marks and apostrophe available are the closing single quotation mark or apostrophe (’) and the closing double quotation mark (”).
Caption in white reads ROY CHUCKLES atop three short sentences in two colours on one line
Caption in blue reads LAUGHTER below the end of a previous sentence in white
Non-speech information can be in various colours depending on source, and, as shown here, is in upper case shoved over to the left a little.
Green, yellow, white, and green sentences in two caption lines
Three people have spoken in these two short lines. Who said what?
Garbled caption (in blue) reading ‘Anot er fat comment, Al?’
Teletext captions are susceptible to signal disruptions. (Line 21 captions are nearly impervious to them.) You get a lot of garbled captions as a result.
Two lines of white captions on a news program
I was simply amazed at how well the Australian newscasts worked: All the pre-scripted captions are pop-on, with real-time scrollup captions used for live speech. However, I can’t recommend it, given that every program I watched, without exception, missed one or more sentences in the changeover from pop-on to scrollup captioning. Given a choice between using nothing but scrollup captions and capturing the entire show or making something look and behave better while missing actual speech, I choose the former.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 17th, 2004 at 18:11 and is filed under Captioning, Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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