08 Feb Tips for Closed Captioning Files: How to Retrieve Captions from Your Old Movies

Photo by Vilseskogen

Okay, this is a great trick that we used just last week.

Assume that you are a film producer and have resold your movie to a new broadcaster. Yay! Now you check your deliverables and hope you don’t have to reformat your master, but it’s likely that you do. Do you have a closed captioning file you can use? No? Well, if not…do you have a captioned copy of your movie?

If you had the original captioning done with us, we have your cc file in our archives and, with a bit of hunting, we can find it and send it to you.

But if someone else did your captioning and you’re the copyright holder for the movie, we can use our MacCaption application to extract the closed captioning from a Quicktime file of your movie. We do a quick check for any data errors, and then you are good to go without having to re-caption your file from scratch.

This way we can bill for a file retrieval instead of a file creation, which is many hours of labour difference.

Hurray! We love it.

Here’s another trick for closed captioning files.

October Recipe: Mushroom and Caramelized Onion Soup

This recipe is inspired by this soup on Epicurious.com. It’s rich and delicious and perfect for Fall.

Ingredients
5 1/2 cups sliced onions
1 T butter
1.5 pounds of sliced mushrooms. Portobellos are really nice, but use whatever your favourite mushroom is, or a blend of different types)
2 T butter
3 cloves crushed garlic
3 T Courvoisier Brandy
8 cups of your favourite stock
1 cup white wine
1 T (or more) thyme, preferably fresh)
Salt and pepper

Saute the onions in 1 tablespoon of butter, then reduce to low until caramelized, and set aside.

In the same pan, saute the sliced mushrooms in 2 tablespoons of butter. When the mushrooms are soft, add the garlic and brandy and stir for 20 seconds. Then add your stock, white wine, thyme, salt and pepper. Raise to a boil, then simmer 45 minutes.

Serve the soup with lots of fresh parsley, as well as cheese and toast if you like. You can make a parmesan topping by gently browning some shredded parmesan in a frying pan, then adding it to your soup bowl, like in the picture above.