On Tuesday, October 5, I enjoyed the superexclusive jet-set ultraprivilege of visiting the executive offices of the Australian Caption Centre in Haymarket, Sydney.
I’d dropped by once before during my Australian Brumby Tour™ in 1995. The expression on the face of the manageress in charge was one of naked fear from start to finish; I didn’t see even one caption the entire time I was in Australia, not even while sitting inside the facility that produces 99% of them; they wouldn’t let me in the taperoom; I was permitted to meet exactly one staff person; and nobody would talk about money.
Curiously, that manageress now works for one of the Australian networks, and in what must surely have been an oversight owing to her busy schedule, failed to respond to requests to meet while I was in Australia this time.
However, Auscap now has a nouveau régime that operates less from a standpoint of paranoia. At the Web Essentials ’04 conference where I spoke, Auscap threw in freebie CART reporting, which generated much interest from speakers and attendees. (See photo links.)
Sadly, the equipment kept breaking down. It crashed repeatedly on Day 1, for which we have no records at all; crashed during the morning of Day 2; and barely creaked along for the second day’s afternoon, with lagtimes of up to 4½ minutes between utterance and displayed text. It was quite inexplicable and the source of some embarrassment even to me, since I’m all big on that captioning shit.
After enjoying a very nice double espresso and shooting everything of note at University of Technology Sydney, I whisked regally up to Auscap’s offices, which, through little or no fault of their own, have rather appalling wayfinding in the hallways.
In the hall, I bumped into one of the lads who was present at the conference (surfer attire), his colleague (starched shirt), and, later, the directrix of new-business development for stenocaptioning services, Kumi Taguchi, seen here in her natural environment brandishing her Dubya bobblehead doll.
I suppose I should show you their reception area. Yes, that’s my hat. Yes, I wore it even in Oz. No, nobody else displayed even the slightest concern for the sunshine, melanoma, or anything else.
I then enjoyed a majestic, almost spiritual tour of Auscap’s offices, hosted by the supremely affable, sensible, and competent Robert Scott.
Do you have any idea how refreshing and reassuring it is to deal with the head of a captioning outfit who isn’t paranoiac, incompetent, defensive, and/or homophobic? Plus I watched a lot of their captions. They’re a’ight, as the kids recently quit saying.
By the way, behind Robert is a wall of televisions connected to the many digital and analogue receivers that are common in Australia. At no time during the extensive period I sat there watching them did all of them display captions or even display captions correctly.
Anyway, here’s where the magic happens, in the Auscap techroom. Admittedly, they’re renovating, but lots of guys (sic) would feel right at home in this kind of environment.
Some clients receive “100% QA” as part of the service. That is, finished and encoded tapes are rewatched for errors. As I passed through, some sappy, pastoral Australian series set in the countryside (which does in fact air on Canadian TV, where I avoid it just as avidly) was playing on the shockingly fabulous Sony monitor. Plus, a nearby system ingested a scene from (as it turns out, the aptly-named-for-that-particular-instant) Sex and the City. I covered up the monitor with my notebook.
(By the way, I looked and looked at PAL television screens in Australia and simply could not detect any superiority of picture quality. Except, of course, on this monitor, which I totally thought was HDTV.)
There weren’t a lot of captioneers working that day. I chatted with one fellow, who was working on a project I swore to keep secret (AUSTRALIA: LAND OF INTRIGUE™). Nobody at all seemed to be a 22-year-old woman fresh out of school with a liberal-arts degree who lives with her parents and muddles through programs she cannot even transcribe – the typical demographic of the Canadian offline captioner.
Plus I got a shot of one of their reference bookshelves. What’s yours like?
Other fun facts
- Real-time captioning for newscasts is done locally at the broadcaster, not remotely, as we do it. I’ll have photos from SBS to show you shortly.
- Auscap does a mad rush each weeknight to open-caption the capsule newscasts shown on Qantas aircraft.
- They looked with perplexity at me when I told them to stop using Arial (mother of God!) or any grotesk for open captioning. This beats the reaction I got at SBS, which I shall describe later.
- Yes, they’ve got Macs – several, in fact.
- I didn’t see much of note or interest in Auscap’s separate business of print translation. Do keep in mind that the glory days of the now-defunct Spectrum Multilanguage Photocomposition are well behind us, and I believe that anybody attempting the same sort of work who is not Spectrum is by definition a hack. Once you’ve had Spectrum, you’ll never go back.
- Auscap captions nearly everything in Australia, save for SBS’s in-house productions, Network Seven’s in-house captioning in Melbourne, and piddly little WordWave. It’s a near-monopoly. And, from what I can tell, something approaching a benevolent monopoly.
Looking forward to visiting again.