Blue 105 VES Software
Once upon a time, we shopped around for a
subtitling and captioning software that would fulfill our requirements.
Good fortune was not on our side: all commercial software reviewed
fell short of our minimum necessities. At that point a decision was made
to involve our software development team in a new project to develop our own
cutting-edge software. Not only this proved to be the way to go to have a software that
would fulfill all our expectations (many times good fortune is where you
least expect it), but it also proved to be the key to be
able to rapidly react to market changes and develop
client-specific tools to help in the subtitling and captioning process.
Subtitling
Subtitling is growing very fast mostly due to the advent of
DVD. Since you can fit numerous subtitling languages on a single DVD, the
rush is on to subtitle not only all new releases but also old movies being
prepped for DVD release.
In short, the process of subtitling involves preparing the English
timed and spotted script, translate it and master the subtitles to either
DVD-ready files or to a master video.
Through our skilled editors and a vast network of
translators all over the world, we are able to prepare your production for
a variety of markets, among which:
Broadcast (Air, Cable, Satellite)
Showing on a TV channel near you, being that via airwaves,
your local cable TV company or your satellite provider.
High-Definition Distribution
This is a new field and very few companies are able to
provide subtitling on High-Definition formats. Blue 105 can and will be
happy to assist you in subtitling any project to high-definition.
DVD Distribution
This is probably the most widely visible distribution,
since it's going to show up at your nearest video store.
Video Distribution
Although ceding market share to DVD, video is
still a major presence in video stores worldwide and some titles require
subtitling presentations.
Airline Distribution
Subtitling productions for this market requires
special attention to the language and to edited versions that may be
required, since the audience includes adults and children alike.
Theatrical Distribution
Although we do not provide film-etching/printing subtitling, we are
actively providing spotting and translations for such application, and we provide
complete processing on traditional digital video and high-definition media
used in movie theaters.
Corporate
Either directly or through partnerships with major
translation companies, we provide subtitling services for corporate
communication, being for employee training, tradeshow showcase, mass
mailings, or executive communications (shareholder videos, meetings,
depositions, etc.)
Internet
Although still a premature for mass consumption, Internet
distribution of movies is slowly becoming a reality and we're ready to
provide subtitling on all current and future standards.
Here's a partial list of the available languages:
 Italian |
Danish |
Turkish |
|
German |
Norwegian |
Spanish
Castilian |
|
French
Continental |
Czech |
Spanish
Latin American |
|
French
Canadian |
Hungarian |
Brazilian Portuguese |
|
Dutch |
Polish |
Japanese |
|
Swedish |
Arabic |
Chinese |
|
Finnish |
Hebrew |
Korean |
Captioning
Captioning differs from subtitling in many
respects. For starters, captioning is targeted at the hearing impaired,
therefore not only you need to transcribe the dialog, but it is necessary
to include sound effects as well, so the viewer is able to understand
who's talking at a particular moment or when music is playing. Another
difference involves the fonts. While in subtitling we have control over
how which font is used on screen and big it is, in captioning fonts are
usually fixed width fonts (like Courier) setup in the TV set decoder.
Captioning can be divided into Open and Closed.
Closed Captions
This is the most common method of captioning. The captions
are encoded into the video signal and are not visible on screen until you
turn captioning ON on your TV set. This is how captioning is included in
broadcasts, home videos and some DVDs.
Open Captions
As the word entails, open captions are not encoded into
the video signals and are instead burned into the video (like subtitles
for video), being visible all the time. The use for open captions spans
from check cassettes when doing a captioning project to specific usage
where a decoder is not available while the audience requires captioning.
Subtitles for the Hearing Impaired (SDH)
This is the method of choice for closed captioning on DVD.
This allows more control over the look of the caption text and the
captions are turned on via the DVD menu, like standard subtitles. The
difference between standard DVD subtitling and SDH is the addition of
special effect descriptions to the latter, to better describe the
story/movie to the hearing impaired.
