One sentence will appear quickly but will stay on the screen longer overall than a pop-on caption would. Individual roll-up captions generally require less load time, but they have a tighter reading rate threshold when it comes to timing due to multiple sentences staying on screen for a longer period of time. The very top line disappears each time a new line populates. These closed captions continuously roll up onto your screen, one right under the next, allowing for more time for the viewer to read them. Live captions on platforms such as Zoom and YouTube only display captions in pop-on style, so viewers of live programs and events on these platforms may experience a slight delay as they wait for all the text. Live captions are sometimes delivered in SRT format as well for VOD programming. These captions are usually delivered in a sidecar caption file format, such as SRT. Some players can decode formatting information, but many do not. Prerecorded web captions always display in pop-on style, but due to many limitations of players and other applications, these captions may lack elements such as caption movement, italics, and music notes.

All uppercase captions or all uppercase speaker IDs.

No speaker IDs for on-screen speakers at all IDs only for off-screen speech or captions containing dual speakers.

Speaker IDs, such as a name followed by a colon, or a name in parentheses.

This placement follows the speaker around the screen.The above aspects of pop-on captions have helped inform our Captionmax House Style, but that is not to say that this is the only way to do pop-on captions varying styles exist and are applied every day to the pop-on captions we create, such as: Timed with ample load and reading time to align with spoken words.Cleanly broken into two lines at conjunctions, end of clauses, prepositions, articles, or grammatical breaks.Sound effects and music descriptors indicated on their own lines, surrounded by brackets.Quotation marks utilized for works of art (movie, show, song titles).Off-screen sound (such as voice-over narration, digitized speech, non-diegetic music) conveyed using italics.Use speaker dashes to differentiate speakers.Rest at the bottom of the screen, moving to the top to avoid lower-third graphics.What do they look like?įor the most optimal readability across viewing platforms, our captioning experts at Captionmax have found that prerecorded pop-on captions with the following style tend to share these qualities: If live captions utilize pop-on style, the text would be delayed, defeating the point of having quick captions delivered right to the viewer as the program is happening. The nature of live captioning means that each word written is immediately sent to an encoder, and encoders must wait for all text information before they can display a caption. Pop-on captions are not used for live broadcast content. Prerecorded captioners have the ability to manipulate timing to closely synchronize with words as they are spoken. Pop-on style is standard for prerecorded content because these captions can be highly customized to best fit the viewing experience and reflect aspects such as timing, tone, and location of speakers. These captions are exactly what they say they are: they pop on your screen and then they disappear when the next caption appears. Pop-on closed captions are what you’re most used to seeing in prerecorded (non-live) broadcast, streaming, and web content. In this article, we’ll give an overview of the three closed captioning types, who uses them, and what variations are possible within each.

Captionmax makes it simple to choose the type and style of closed captions that are right for you. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be. Even the decision of which service of closed captioning to use-Live or Prerecorded-can be daunting. When entering the world of closed captioning for your media, it’s easy to get bogged down with the all the variations, customizations, and styles that can be applied to your captions.

Closed caption meaning