Earnest Captioning

I've started captioning in earnest now. I did 26 hours in May, 20 in the first two weeks of June, and I'm already scheduled for 30 in July. I wind up picking up a lot of shifts as things go along, though. I've worked on every day of the week, but mostly in the evening. I still like to keep morning/afternoon open for CART, since it pays better. I've captioned a variety of things; PBS shows, those shows where they tell you about stuff to do in the area, and even an infomercial. I didn't like that one at all. They talked so fast, and they kept repeating the same thing.

I mostly do news, which I'm not that fond of. It's awesome that they only talk for about 10 minutes, and then take a break, and then they're only back for a couple minutes before you get another break. Even if I caption an hour-long show, they're never on for a very long block of time. I don't enjoy the content, though. I like classes better, although classes can get pretty boring, and it's really painful writing for that long without a break.

I've been sitting down to get ready about half an hour before my show is scheduled to start, to give me time to get the IE adjusted if I need to move anything around, and pull up my briefs for the station, and the info sheet, and the live stream of the broadcast, and get my screen organized with everything where it needs to be. About half the time, I have to call in 10 minutes before the show to make sure the station can see the captions. And I've been trying to do about 10 minutes of prep on the current news.

My prep hasn't been too fruitful, though. About 80% of what I put in doesn't even get used. I recently switched over to just looking at the headlines, and then if they tease a story I'll see if I can find any info on it. I've only done that a few times, but it's worked out okay so far. I'm going to try maybe sitting down 25 minutes ahead of time instead of 30. It really starts to suck up a lot of time in your day once you get enough newscasts going that are only billable for 30 minutes, but you're losing an hour or more of your time to them.

I'm starting to feel more confident about writing the news, though. At first it was pretty scary, but it's not a big deal anymore. I do hit 300 wpm regularly, though, especially during the weather. My average speed for captioning is at 198 wpm, compared to 181 for CART. I think having to write so fast for captioning has helped me write faster on CART. I feel more confident about being able to get everything that's being said, anyway.

Sometimes the shows have scripts. I don't like that at all. It takes like two hours to prep an hour long script. I feel like I'm a transcriptionist. I could just enter some words and write it live, but I know it'll look a lot better if I go from the script. Eclipse is supposed to have a feature that puts a new paragraph after each period, but it doesn't work for me for some reason. I should probably call support and see what they say about that.

Scripting Graduations

I'm scheduled to cover three graduations, starting with two tomorrow. I got scripts for two of them. I've never used a script before. I saw someone use one once, and they told me a few things. I also watched the two-hour AccuCap training video, so I at least saw what's possible there, although nothing really stuck concretely since it wasn't relevant to me at the time. I spent about five or six hours formatting the first script. It took me forever just to figure out how to name segments using script commands.

I also learned that copying and pasting from Word is not a good idea, after I had already edited the entire script. I had to go back through and take out all these weird little places where the tabs in Word didn't show up in the script, but when I pushed them through realtime, they were making this weird arrow. I had to look up how to format songs, because at one graduation they're playing the National Anthem, and at both they're going to sing the Alma Mater.

I had to put tons of professor names in my dictionary, and text global all kinds of stuff to make sure it's going to come out capitalized properly even if I don't have time to do it manually.  I put a little note to myself in the spaces where someone is likely to talk and it's not scripted, so I'll have a little bit of a head's up that I need to start writing. My biggest worry right now about the whole deal is that I'm going to accidentally send out one of those notes!

I don't have a script yet for the first graduation, and it's at 1:30 tomorrow. If I have to just write it live, at least I kind of know the process since I've read the scripts for the other two.

I was able to use a cool shortcut I saw on the Eclipse FB group to help me out with scripting. I tested out how I'm going to arrange everything on the actual day, and it was tough fitting all the windows in, so I got rid of the notes display with Ctrl+Shift+F5, which was a huge help.