Video Distribution Company Wins Back 10 Hours per Project on Closed Captions [Case Study]
Rev › Blog › Customer Features ›
Video production companies of all sizes use Rev’s captioning services to source closed captions during the post-production process. Read on to find out how Mojo Makers, a full-service digital distribution company, cut the amount of time it takes to produce premium quality caption files from 16 to 6 hours by working with Rev.
Key Takeaways
By using Rev for a first-take on creating closed caption files, Mojo Makers is able to:
- Cut the amount of time spent captioning movies in half
- Save money on closed caption production
- Deliver faster turnaround time to their clients
The Background: Media Distribution Masters
As experts in media distribution, the team at Mojo Makers works on getting popular films like “American Hustle” and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” in front of massive audiences. They handle every aspect of streaming media distribution, from quality control to the film submission process.
If you want your film to be hosted on any of the most popular video streaming platforms, like Netflix or iTunes, you’ll need to ensure that it meets each platform’s standards. One important and mandatory step in getting movies prepped for streaming is the creation of the closed caption file. If you want to expand your market reach, localizing your title with subtitles is a key step to offering your product across multiple territories.
According to Mike Edwards, VP of Operations at Mojo Makers, “For our customers, we facilitate full-service archive, asset management, and digital distribution. We can localize their films with subtitles, artwork, and metadata. Our customers come to us and say, ‘I’ve got these assets. I need them to go to these places, and I need help getting into those places,’ and we facilitate that for them. We have delivered to 200+ platforms globally; we can create assets for and deliver to any platform out there.”
The Challenge: Poor Captions Files
Today, premium streaming services have increasingly high standards on captions and subtitles. There’s no room for sub-par captions. To improve accessibility, caption files must be accurate, timed and aligned properly. If captions don’t pass the test, your content simply will not make it to those platforms.
The average feature-length film runs about 100 minutes in length. Adding captions to a movie of that length once took the in-house team at Mojo about 15 hours to complete. They were spending too much of their time and valuable resources on preparing captions and subtitles for their clients.
As a solution, they tried to outsource captioning work to a few different companies but for the money they were spending, the quality just wasn’t there.
“We needed a higher percentage of accuracy than they were providing us for the cost. We would have to fully QC the entire caption file by reading every caption block and look for correct placement; this takes hours to do. Then we would have to create a fully detailed QC report just to go back to the vendor to get the errors fixed. It just was too difficult to do.”
The Solution: Rev Closed Captions Service
Eventually, Mike and the Mojo team found Rev. With Rev, closed captions cost only $1 per audio minute with 99% accuracy and 24-hour turnaround guaranteed.
By relying on Rev to provide a first-take on caption file creation, Mike has cut the amount of time his team spends QC’ing movies in half. Here’s more on what he has to say about the process.
“If we have a customer that needs captions created and they do not have a script, we send it to Rev. We will create a proxy and upload it to Rev instead of handing that project off to a captioner and bottlenecking our workflow. In a couple of days we’ll get back a caption file that is complete, timed and pretty close.
Then we hand the Rev file to a technician, they go through and watch the entire movie, and correct it as they go. A caption create can take 10 to 16 hours, depending on the type of movie it is. Working with Rev knocks that down to under six hours, without much additional cost.
The price point is great and the turnaround time is fast. We think the quality that comes from Rev is consistent and good. With Rev, we can plan our workflows and better predict the amount of time a project will take. This helps control cost and scheduling, the results make the facility run a lot smoother.”
Click to view in PDF format:
