Captioning: Legal Deposition
 

Is a videographer expected to caption the entire deposition word for word- using the court reporter's text? What does captioning refer to? Texting who is is who and where is where?

You need to find a service that does this. And for legal proceedings, it needs to be done by a person certified to do it. Charge the client(s) for this service.

Start here:

Welcome to the National Court Reporters Association


Captioning is essentially, putting a word for word copy of what was said onto the screen. Basically, capturing the stenographers output onto your video.

I've been doing depositions for years and have never heard of this. Is this just a query or have you gotten a request for this?

Mick Haensler
Higher Ground Media

Federal rule 508, regarding accessability. If you haven't heard of it, you soon will. It's affecting nearly everything I do. Every video I produce for work now has to be captioned. With current national rates sitting between 7 and 12 dollars per MINUTE, you can imagine how that's affecting us in this economy.

Section 508 applies to federal agencies and some states may have similar initiatives.

This may be helpful:

GTRI | ELSYS | Human Systems Engineering Branch | Overview of State Accessibility Laws, Policies, Standards and Other Resources Available On-line

I sit on the 508 committee for my agency as an IT representative and because my work also includes video, I have a fairly regular interaction with 508, captioning (open and closed), etc.

It's a broad issue that will affect many of us in video at some point.

If you already have a transcript, this site will create a caption file that conforms the text to the video. Section 508 does not in itself require legally defensible captions. Many deaf or low hearing individuals would rather NOT have all the "um's" and "ah's" left in.

The cost is around $80/finished hour of captions and they can give you multiple output file types (WMV, QT, Flash, DVD) for the one charge. If you need transcriptions too, AutomaticSync partners with companies that will do that seamlessly as part of the service (this extra cost brings it up to around $170/hour). They can also send a text file for proofing/changes before the caption job occurs.

Welcome to CaptionSync!