With the new MPEG CC Strip and MPEG CC Insert helpers, your DVD Studio Pro projects can deliver closed captions as well as subtitles.

Closed Caption information on NTSC DVDs is carried as User Data blocks associated in the MPEG video stream. This information can be inserted into the MPEG video as part of the encoding process or at any time thereafter.

Once the closed caption information has been inserted, the video is used in authoring just like any other video. The only difference is that closed caption information will be available when the DVD is played back on a caption-capable DVD player.

MPEG CC Insert uses industry standard '.scc' files to supply the caption information and timecode that identifies where they are to appear in the video.

CCaption on the Mac and Caption Maker on the PC are examples of applications that you can use to make your own closed caption data files in the .scc format.

A better choice for many is to use a professional captioning service bureau to perform the work that is both demanding and tedious. Any of these bureaus wil be able to supply captions in the required form.

If you are working from analog source, you may be able to extract the existing captions using a decoder device or as part of the video capture process.

MPEG CC Strip extracts and removes closed caption data from an MPEG video stream, producing a standard .scc file and the MPEG video without the caption information.

You can use MPEG CC Strip and Insert together to shift the whole caption track relative to the video or to edit and re-insert the caption data.

As always, the Mac OS 9 versions of MPEG CC Strip and MPEG CC Insert are free. Mac OS X versions are included as part of the MPEG Append for OS X suite of applications.

Click the Download button on the left to check them out!

All current and future versions of the MPEG Append suite will be offered for Mac OS X as commercial products. The price for the collection of carbonated applications is $49. Versions for Mac OS 9 will be kept current and will remain free of charge.

The MPEG Append suite was carbonated because a commercial product needed MPEG Telecine and needed to run on the OS X platform. That product is DVD Film Transformer.

DVD Film Transformer

DVD Film Transformer is a special kind of export component that performs inverse telecine, filtering and scaling of Video and Audio so that it can be used in high quality DVD presentations.

DVD Film Transformer allows you to take film based video, remove the ugly pulldown frames and write it out as progressive video for encoding with almost any MPEG 2 encoder including the QuickTime MPEG Export component (part of the DVD SP package), the BitVice encoder as well as the TMPGEnc and ProCoder encoders on the PC.

DVD Film Transformer will allow you to repurpose your new or existing progressive video. For example, you can convert NTSC progressive video to the frame rates and aspect ratio required for PAL presentation, or convert progressive PAL footage to NTSC format. Convert letterboxed video into anamorphic video or vice versa.

Audio is scaled to match the output format so preparing your assets is simple.

DVD Film Transformer is $99 with everything you need to work with progressive video on Mac OS 9. If you need to work with Mac OS X, you can purchase the MPEG Append Suite for Mac OS X with DVD Film Transformer for only $25 more.

MPEG Append is the first DVD SP Helper. It allows you to append several MPEG 2 encoded files into either a single file or files of the same length as the originals, but with correct and consecutive timecode information in the files.

Apple has describe the requirements for using multi-segment MPEG files in DVD Studio Pro in a Knowledge Base Article.

This feature was originally intended to support encoders that could not create file larger than 2 Gigabytes in a single encode.

With MPEG Append, you can use that feature to simplify your workflow.

Instead of re-encoding a long movie from scratch because of a small change, MPEG Append allows you to encode the movie as small segments such as by scene or by chapter. When a change is needed, you only need to re-encode the affected segment, then use MPEG Append to create a single MPEG stream.

As second variant of MPEG Append is Force Anamorphic. In addtion to the functions of MPEG Append, this helper will force the anamophic aspect ratio setting in the output file.