17. MovieCaptioner crashed. Is there a way to recover my project?
1. How do I make Line 21 captions for broadcasting with Final Cut Pro? How about CEA-708 captions?
Final Cut Pro version 7, with a compatible AJA KONA or BlackMagic Decklink video card, will now allow you to import your SCC file and print it to tape along with your movie. After completing your MovieCaptioner project, you can test your captions by embedding the caption track in your QT movie using the SCC Embed in QT export option in MovieCaptioner. Once you've finalized your captions, export your project as a Sonic Scenarist (SCC) file. Final Cut Pro 7 will give you the option to import an SCC caption file after you select Print To Tape. It will then print the captions to the tape along with your video. Final Cut will print the captions in the standard location for CEA-708 captions as well. See the link below.
Additional information on Line 21 captions and CEA-708 captions, can be found at the Apple site here: http://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutstudio/workflows/index.html#chapter=6%26section=5
[Top]
2. I just upgraded to Snow Leopard and QuickTime doesn't embed my captions even though I have QT Pro.
With Snow Leopard, a new version of QuickTime (QuickTime X) is installed by default with your operating system. QuickTime X does not have the same functionality as QuickTime Pro, so you will need to install QuickTime 7 from the Snow Leopard install disk if it wasn't installed initially with the upgrade. The installer will put QuickTime 7 in your Applications/Utilities folder. The installer can also be downloaded form the Apple site if you don't have your installer disk available.
[Top]
3. My captions or video are not showing up when I hit the Preview button or export to QT Embedded captions.
MovieCaptioner works best if you move their movies from an external hard drive to your main hard drive. If your movie is on an external hard drive, MovieCaptioner may have trouble finding the movie or writing the QT Text file necessary for Preview, Embedded QT, or SMIL movies. If MovieCaptioner crashes on export or the movie does not load in QT on use of the Preview button, this may be the cause. I typically put both the project and the movie on my Desktop while I work, then move them to another folder or hard drive when I'm done. When editing a previous project I just move them to the Desktop again and open the project.
Another reason that captions may not show up is that in either the Preview or SMIL exports (which are the same thing), the computer's operating system language MUST match the selected default language (in MovieCaptioner Preferences). Othewise you will just get a blank where the captions should be.
[Top]
4. My captions are a second or two off when I export as embedded SCC captions.
You may need to use "Shift Start Times..." under the edit window to fine tune your SCC export timing. It sometimes depends on how you got your captions in to begin with. If you set them all in MovieCaptioner, they're probably fine, but if you imported from an SCC file, for example, they may be slightly off as SCC files can be optimized for different outputs (such as Compressor or DVD Studio Pro).
[Top]
5. I get garbage characters when I Preview or export to Embedded QT captions.
QuickTime doesn't support special characters very well. Instead, go to the Export menu and choose Embedded QuickTime (Unicode). This will embed an XML file for your captions which may then display properly. You also have the option under the MovieCaptioner Preferences to select UTF-16 encoding for most export formats which may help as well.
[Top]
6. MovieCaptioner won't launch.
If MovieCaptioner fails to launch, try deleting your preferences file. It will create a new one once it's opened again. To do so, go to your
UserFolder/LIbrary/Preferences/ and delete the file called MovCaptionerPrefs.
[Top]
7. I get garbage characters when I import text.
First, make sure you are importing a ".txt" file and not RTF or MS Word, which can contain text formatting which will show up as garbage characters, which can interfere with your caption exports. You can try opening your text file in BBEdit (or the free version called Text Wrangler) and selecting the "Zap Gremlins" option under Text menu, then saving the file. You may also need to resave your text file as UTF-8 encoding (an option when you Save As from BBedit or Text Wrangler). Another option might be to try resetting your MovieCaptioner Preferences for imported text encoding.
[Top]
8. I get an error that says "This does not appear to be a file created by MovieCaptioner".
If you get this error, it probably means you closed out of the project before entering any captions. You'll need to start over in this case by loading your movie again. Since you never set any captions you haven't really lost anything.
[Top]
9. My movie is not opening in the QuickTime Player.
If your movie does not open in the QuickTime Player, first be sure that you have the Pro version of the QuickTime Player or the caption track cannot be added. Also, if you are using Snow Leopard, make sure you have QuickTime 7 installed. QuickTime X (the default QT Player for Snow Leopard) will not give you all the functionality of QuickTime Pro.
Another reason for the failure of QuickTime to launch could be that there is a timing conflict with some of your captions, ie, there may be caption occurring at 00:05:03 and the caption following it may be the exact same time or at a previous time like 00:05:01. This shouldn't really happen, but if it does it will confuse QuickTime Pro, so the track will not be added. MovieCaptioner should auto-check your timecode to see if any rows are out of sequential timecode order and let you know, but sometimes it may miss something.
Another reason for the failure of QuickTime to launch could be that you are using brackets "[ ]" or "{ }" somewhere in your captions. While these may work in some caption formats, others will give an error in both Preview (SMIL) and Embedded QT caption formats. The reason for this is that some formats use QT Text files. When QT sees the square brackets, it expects timecode to be between them and thus throws an error. You can do a search for brackets using the Find/Replace option under the Edit menu. Try using parentheses instead of brackets.
Another problem could be that the movie you are trying to add captions to is write-protected, or that it is on a CD, in which case it cannot be changed. Try saving a copy of the movie to the Desktop and using that one in your project instead. MovieCaptioner tries to write the QT Text file into the same directory as the movie, so if the movie is on a CD or another hard drive, it may not be able to do so.
[Top]
10. After I export, I see to sets of captions, one at the top and one at the bottom of my movie.
If you are seeing this when you hit the Preview button, you probably forgot to close out of the QuickTime Player before going back to editing in MovieCaptioner. Always close the QuickTime Player window before going back to MovieCaptioner.
If you click the Embedded Captions button and you end up seeing two sets of captions (top and bottom), you probably already have a caption track in the movie and it will need to be removed before adding a new caption track. Go to the Edit menu and choose Remove Text Track From Movie. Or you may open the movie in QuickTime Pro, go to the Movie Properties window and delete the extra tracks there. MovieCaptioner assumes you only have a video and a sound track in your movies. It may also mean that you embedded captions, then left the QT Player window open when you went back to edit your captions. Always close the QT Player window before going back to MovieCaptioner to edit.
Make sure your movies have a video track and a sound track and not a single muxed track that you get with MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 videos. A muxed track will cause issues when you go to embed captions. You can tell by opening the movie in QT Pro and selecting the Show Movie Properties window. Also, some movies ripped from DVD or from a DVD video camera may contain several tracks. Delete all but the video and audio tracks and save the movie before trying to embed captions.
[Top]
11. My Embedded SCC captions are not showing up in QuickTime. I get a black screen that says "Sonic Scenarist V1.0".
You probably have an issue with timecode in your project. Make sure all timecodes are in sequence and preferably at least one second apart to give the player enough time to buffer the next captions. Otherwise they could be skipped and/or an error such as this will occur. Another reason would be if you do not have the ClosedCaptionImporter plugin installed or installed incorrectly. You can download the CloseCaptionImporter.component here. Another possibility is that two (or more) of the captions are long and are coming in too quickly in succession. Sometimes the SCC format cannot display the captions so close together and it results in an error. Try breaking up the captions somewhat to even them out if possible.
[Top]
12. Where are my SCC captions? I embedded them in my movie and now they're not there.
If you close your SCC captioned movie without saving, QuickTime Player will not warn you to save and you'll lose your caption track and will have to export again from MovieCaptioner (don't worry, your captions will still be in your MovieCaptioner project window).
If you did save your SCC captioned movie and you don't see the captions next time you open it in QuickTime Player, go to the View menu and choose Show CLosed Captioning. This is turned off by default in QuickTime Player.
[Top]
13. When I try to save my captions in the QT Player, I get an error that says "The movie could not be saved. The end of the file was reached."
This usually means that there is something wrong with the movie, even though it may play correctly in QuickTime. You may need to re-export your movie from Final Cut or wherever it was originally made and try again.
[Top]
14. My QT SMIL movies don't display my captions online.
Embedding a QT SMIL movie in a web page will require you to use absolute URLs to the files instead of the local ones written by MovieCaptioner. Also, all 3 files (the QT movie, the QT text file, and the QT.SMI file) should be uploaded to the same folder on your website. So if they are uploaded to http://www.mywebsite.com/movies/ you will need to go into the .qt.smi file and change the links to the video source and textstream source to "http://www.mywebsite.com/movies/myMovie.mov" and "http://www.mywebsite.com/movies/myMovie.txt".
Note that there is a known bug in QuickTime for Windows that may garble the sound on Windows computers when movies are played via a QT SMIL file. The only fix seems to be to play the SMIL file in the QuickTime Player for Windows (instead of the browser), then open the AV Control panel and slightly adjust the Pitch, Jog, or Playback Speed and the sound will become normal. Just moving one of these controls slightly should do the trick. It can be reset to the default value after that and the sound will work.
[Top]
15. I get an error that says "An exception of class OutOfBoundsException was not handled. The application must shut down." when I try to open my project. Then MovieCaptioner crashes.
A couple things can cause this. First, make sure you have MovieCaptioner installed properly in your main hard drive's Applications folder. If that's not the issue, then open your project (.mcpt) file in a text editor such as BBEdit or Text Wrangler and make sure that Soft Wrap Text is not enabled (so things that are written to one line stay on one line and are not wrapped). Due to a bug in earlier versions of MovieCaptioner, extra carriage returns may get saved into the project in the captions line, which is line 8 if you have "Show Line Numbers" enabled in BBEdit. Look at your file. The line with the captions (all separted by ":::") should be on line 8 only. They should not wrap to two or more lines. If you have more than one line of captions, then you need to get all the captions back on line 8. Just put your cursor before the next line and hit the Delete key to move that line up to line 8. Do this for each extra line, being careful to keep the ":::" separators intact. Then try opening it in MovieCaptioner again. If you can't get it, send your project file to me at synchrimedia@gmail.com and I'll try to fix it for you right away. This error will not occur again since version 4.1 was released. It was caused by editing in the text area below the movie (instead of in the caption list). A line break would get written back into the caption and transferred to the project file. That won't happen anymore, but I'd still recommend editing in the caption list on the right and using the text area only for creating new captions.
[Top]
16. After exporting the SCC captions to be embedded in the QT movie, when I try to save I get an "End of File" error and it never saves.
This is caused (for some reason) by movies that are exported from either Final Cut Pro or Compressor usually. What you need to do is open the movie in QT Pro and re-export using h.264 and AAC audio (even if it already was). The new movie should fix the problem.
[Top]
17. MovieCaptioner crashed. Is there a way to recover my project?
As of version 4.4 of MovieCaptioner, a Backup folder was added to the user/Library/Application Support/MovieCaptioner folder. When you close your MovieCaptioner project, MovieCaptioner will copy all the files in the Temp folder and add them to a folder (named by the date) in the Backup folder. This is easily accessible via the File menu in MovieCaptioner. Select the version of your project with the highest number that is appended to the file name and that should be the most recent version. It will ask you to resave your project to another location.
[Top]
