A new episode of “Top Gear” airs tonight on BBC America. Offline captioner Brandon Woo, is the primary captioner for the series and has worked on the last six series… that’s 45 episodes! We caught up with Brandon for a brief Q&A about the series and his experiences captioning it. How do you go about…
Read MoreSaturday nights at VITAC are a tradition. Every week, our realtime department captions “Saturday Night Live,” a process that takes alomost all night. We’ve captioned more than 366 episodes over the past eight years. Ted Gilliland, a Senior Coordinator, is just one of the many Production Coordinators that oversees the process. Ted has been at…
Read MoreTLC wraps up the second season of its hit series, “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” this Friday. VITAC’s offline team captioned TLC’s “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding,” a documentary series about Roma Gypsy and Irish Traveler weddings. Captioning each episode is a multi-step process. First, one offline captioner transcribes the entire episode – even the…
Read MoreHow to use YouTube’s new captioning features Earlier this month, YouTube unveiled new features for closed captioning. These additions will make it easier to find and search closed captioned videos, expand your audience (with speech-to-text captions for English, Korean and Japanese), and translations for over 155 languages. To find videos with closed captions, enter “,…
Read MoreAt VITAC, we love all captions. We think everyone should watch them ─ the benefits to viewers have been proven ─ whether to improve reading retention, learn English, or better understand a television program. That being said, our number one viewer complaint/request is, “how do I turn off captions?” We don’t advocate turning captions off,…
Read MoreMovie goers have another reason to watch the movie “Abduction.” Not only with the thriller filmed in Pittsburgh, but our HR Manager, Mark Panichella made his film debut!! Last summer, Mark read a casting call for terrorist extra roles and thought he has what it takes to make the cut. After the casting director saw…
Read MoreSpotlight on Iowa… home to many VITAC Captioners What comes to mind when you think of the state of Iowa? Perhaps you think of the capital, Des Moines… or picture Quaker Oats, the world’s largest cereal company… or imagine riding Iowa’s only operating antique carousel in Story City… or recall the Iowa State Fair’s historic “Butter Cow”…
Read MoreHaboobs in the News This week’s “Unsung Hero” is Tammy Uhl, a realtime captioner who recently covered CNN’s “Morning Express with Robin Meade.” While captioning the show’s segment about Phoenix’s recent sandstorms, Tammy came across the meteorological term “haboob.” Did her fingers freeze? Did she laugh uncontrollably? Of course not! Tammy didn’t miss a beat and continued captioning (with a…
Read MoreOffline Training Supervisor Brendan McLaughlin details his very specialized captioning talent. Who knew? by Brendan McLaughlin, Offline training supervisor I would hazard a guess that there are very few school students who aspire to one day decide what sound effects to use when captioning cartoons. However, that’s a big part of my job at VITAC.…
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