Why has closed captioning traditionally been so difficult?
Closed captioning has often been considered only as an afterthought, not only for editors and production facilities, but also for hardware and software manufacturers. Different video systems had to invent different workarounds in order to support closed captioning, so there are a huge variety of different workflows needed to support all the various formats and systems that are out there, and many “gotchas” that can disrupt an otherwise smooth workflow. Also, most NLE programs and video conversion and compression programs were not designed to support closed captioning at all, so different “tricks” are needed in order to make it work. Often, any processing or conversion done to a video will strip out the closed captions. A huge amount of R&D has been necessary to find, support, and document all of the various workaround and tricks that are specific to each format or system.
