Filed under: Audio A, Vidiots | Tags: cc commercial, closed captioning, disabilities act, hd broadcast, hearing impaired, tv ad
Captioning your commercial is still considered an option by most advertisers, but recent observations of captioning practices lead me to believe it is becoming a necessity.
Most of us are familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires Closed Captioning on all program-length material, whether TV programs or extended infomercials. Realizing that approximately 140 people out of every 1,000 suffer from some hearing “trouble” (source: http://gri.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php), many advertisers also choose to caption their commercials.
While captioning your commercials also benefits people with perfect hearing that watch television in places where the sound is purposefully low or inaudible – sports bars, doctor and hospital waiting rooms, and airport gates, I recently discovered another excellent reason for captioning your commercial.
While working out on my treadmill, I switched my television display to the Closed Captioning option rather than crank up the audio level. I’ve been helping out with CC encoding at VTA for awhile now, and one of the first things I was taught was to insert a “CC OFF” bit at the end of the program or commercial. But while trodding along on the treadmill, I was amazed at the number of shows and commercials that obviously didn’t have this command. When it is missing, the final captioning stays on the screen until the next captioned material begins playing.
If that next commercial is yours, and it isn’t captioned, the captioning from the previous piece stays visible over a third of YOUR spot for about 20 seconds, distracting viewers from YOUR message and possibly covering up valuable information on YOUR spot. You or your client have spent good money for air time and your message may be getting lost to 14% of the hearing-impaired and who knows how many in bars and waiting rooms because someone else omitted the “CC OFF” bit.
VTA offers Closed Captioning services for Standard Definition and High Definition programs and commercials at competitive rates. Captioning can be done in real time or offline, roll-up or pop-on. Clients can provide text in a MS Word document or we can transcribe the commercial and insert captions. Even if you choose not to caption your commercial, VTA can insert a “CLEAR CC” command at the beginning of your spot which will ensure that previous captioning vanishes when your spot airs.
If you are interested in our captioning services, please contact Jodi, jodi.arminio@vta.com or Kelly, Kelly.dellinger@vta.com for pricing and scheduling information.
- David M. Turner
Filed under: Player's Corner 2.0, Vidiots | Tags: advertising, online engagement, online video, online video trends, rich media, seo statistics, video seo
I wanted to share some data on current statistics regarding online video and its impact in marketing and entertainment.
The most astonishing news is in SEO.
According to a recent study by Forrester Research Video SEO is 53 times more likely to produce a first-page search result than traditional techniques. Google, for one, is pushing video to the top of all its search results. Results can be achieved in a matter of days, and there are publishers who succeed in getting at least 25% of their videos to produce first page results.
This video must be on a landing page or home page (not YouTube) and be submitted correctly to the search engine companies. Here is an article on the subject.
Then there is video rich advertising.
This was tested in 5 categories: Aided Branded Awareness, Online Ad Awareness, Message Association, Brand Favorability and Purchase Intent. Video was the front runner by far in all categories except Message Association. Video beat Simple Flash by an average of 400% across all metrics except Messaging. Please see below for the breakdown.
A more in-debt analysis can be found at Double Click.
Other notable findings from December 2009 from ComScore include:
- 86.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- 134.4 million viewers watched more than 13 billion videos on YouTube.com (97.1 videos per viewer).
- 44.9 million viewers watched 423.3 million videos on MySpace Sites (9.4 videos per viewer).
- The average Hulu viewer watched 22.9 videos, totaling 2.2 hours of videos per viewer.
- The duration of the average online video was 4.1 minutes.
Additionally, research of rich media video ads conducted by AccelaCast, consisting of 32,000 viewers concluded the average engagement per viewer was 4.6 minutes.
All this is good news for VTA when looking into the future. With broadband accounting for nearly 75% of online users, video is a natural fit. Please look to us to help you with your online video for 2010. Contact me and I’ll be glad to talk strategy and rates.
- Brett Player, Creative Director
Filed under: Vidiots | Tags: broadcast, creative business, edit, multi-media, partner, vendor, video production, video story-telling
First, a little English lesson…
ven·dor [ven-der; especially contrastively ven-dawr]
–noun
1. a person or agency that sells.
2. a vending machine.
part·ner [pahrt-ner]
–noun
1. a person who shares or is associated with another in some action or endeavor; sharer; associate.
2. a player on the same side or team as another
When it comes to the type of work we do, I’m not too fond of being referred to as a “vendor.” After all, we’re in the creative business, which is so much more than selling, and as convenient as it sounds, we can’t stick money in a slot and have a custom video or multi-media presentation pop out like magic. So when it comes to our clients, we like to think of ourselves as partners, not vendors. Because what we do, and do well, is integrate our selves into a client’s organization in order to better tell the client’s story. We listen. We digest. We recommend. What’s important to them; becomes important to us. The ultimate goal is to help the client succeed, whether that be in the effort to raise funds, promote a service/product, communicate with company associates, train new employees or increase sales. To that end, we become as passionate about the client’s product or service as the clients themselves and go the extra mile to provide a finished product that is effective, dynamic and worthy of showcasing.
What we do is truly a service industry and more often than not, we give a lot more than we take. But then again, that’s what team players do – they set up the shot, so that someone else can make the goal – namely, the client.
-Ada Sheerin, Creative Producer / Director VTA
Filed under: Vidiots | Tags: axial, broadcast, down conversion, evertz hd logo inserter, high definition broadcast, high definition closed captioning, live edit, multiple record, rendering time, video on demand, weather channel
Viewers of The Weather Channel are used to getting accurate and timely national and local forecasts 24 hours a day. But for the past few years, TWC has produced compelling original programming which shows how the weather affects our daily lives and altered the course of history.
“100 Greatest Weather Moments”, “Epic Conditions”, “Weather Ventures” and “When Weather Changed History” are some of the programs TWC has produced and broadcast on this topic. Seeking to widen their audience, TWC offered these and other series as Video On Demand. For the third year in a row, VTA has been privileged to be TWC’s choice of editorial partner on this project.
The Weather Channel project started with a phone call. They wanted to know if we could reformat their broadcast HD masters to VOD specifications faster than the current workflows and without disturbing the existing HD closed captioning.
As clients and staff of VTA know, I likes a technical challenge. Because VTA uses video equipment from many different manufacturers, I was able to create a new workflow for TWC that maximized technical quality and accuracy while minimizing post-production time.
Live Edit is a tool that VTA has used to great effect in the past and I was certain it could save our client time and money. Rather than taking the time to capture, render and output half-hour or one-hour shows, I decided to work directly off the HDCam masters and add the Weather Channel logo in realtime using our Evertz HD logo inserter.
Because the TWC logo could not interfere with existing graphics and supers already in the program, I used VTA’s Axial 3000 edit controller to precisely time the fades or cuts of the logo to be as unobtrusive as
possible while maintaining field accuracy to the existing edits.
To capture and output back to tape a one hour show takes at least two hours. Rendering time to add an HD logo throughout the program increased total delivery time per episode way beyond that. Live Edit was the solution that kept the project on schedule and budget.
After successful use in 2007 and ’08, TWC added, in late 2009, an additional requirement for the series “Storm Stories”. For this program, standard definition Digital BetaCam masters were generated at the same time as the HDCam VOD masters using real-time downconversion.
Live Edit came through again. By using the Multiple-Record feature of the Axial, I was able roll HD and SD tape machines, cascade the video through different mix/effects banks of the switcher and transcode HD closed captions to SD without needing an additional pass.”
VTA is not locked into a single edit system manufacturer or workflow, butcan provide the flexibility and quality that its clients have come to expect for the past 40 years.
-Bob Castro.
