At this week's NAB show in Las Vegas, CPC, which specializes in closed captioning and subtitling software solutions, has announced development of a complete software-only HD closed captioning solution for users of Avid Media Composer.

This software-only metadata workflow will save Avid users time and money by eliminating the need for a dedicated external hardware closed caption encoder which can cost US$8,000 or more, simplifying workflows for handling video with closed captioning data, according to the folks at CPC. Closed captioning is required by the FCC for virtually all TV broadcasts in the United States, and by the CRTC for most TV broadcasts in Canada.

This new workflow allows facilities to complete the entire closed captioning process in-house. For an upcoming Media Composer release, Avid has developed a workflow for working with high definition video metadata, including closed caption data. CPC’s closed captioning software is a full caption preparation suite, which lets users create or import a script, format and synchronize the text, and finally creates an Avid-compatible metadata file containing CEA-708 and CEA-608 encoded data. This file is then brought into Avid Media Composer and placed on a metadata track, which preserves the metadata when outputting via Avid hardware interfaces.

CPC’s software generates a small captions file which takes less than 5MB per hour of video. Whether editing in full uncompressed HD, DNxHD, or any other codec, this file that carries the encoded caption data can be archived locally or transferred over the internet to any Media Composer user.

What's more, this workflow is compatible with CPC’s e-Captioning technology (http://www.cpcweb.com/e-captioning), which allows closed caption service companies to e-mail closed captioning files to Avid Media Composer users, without the need to physically mail master tapes back and forth.