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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Topic: Hearing-impaired get movie treat
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John Hawkinson
Film God
Posts: 2273
From: Cambridge, MA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 05-14-2004 02:30 PM
Frank asked, "How can a AMC and Loews be expected to comply with this ruling if the film producers aren't part of the solution? Seems to me, in an economic model where the studio gets 90% of the gate, they should absorb 90% of the cost of supplying captioning."
Realistically, the film distributors are part of the solution. Somewhere around half of the major films released are available with captioning. The number seems to be growing. One observation is that if they are going to caption the movie eventually, that they might as well do it before the first run release, rather than later for the DVD. It's the same cost.
(And yes, I know that captioning is not the same as subtitling. Captioned DVDs are available, though they are not as common as subtitled ones. Furthermore, I'm under the impression that doing captioning and subtitling together is a major cost savings over doing each independently.)
Furthermore, the film distributors do have to pay for the movies to be captioned. That involves hiring people who write the captions and synchronize them to the events in the movie. It's not trivial, and it does cost money (perhaps a relatively small amount compared to the cost of the film, but it is still real money).
Finding captioned films to show doesn't seem to be a problem. If you have one screen in a multiplex that supports captioning, chances are you'll always have a film with captioning available to run in that house. (Of course, it complicates the already complicated problem of what print to run in what size house, etc., etc.)
It occurs to me that one way to handle this would be to design the multiplex so that the captioning stuff is portable. If you happen to have DTS in most houses, then it's trivial to move the DTS-CSS unit and plug its Y cable into an already-installed DTS timecode reader. The LED display that we have (from Data Display; there are 3 main vendors for the devices, they are one) comes with a mounting option to make it easily removable and portable. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine moving the captioning display and the CSS unit from one screen to another. You just need to ensure there's a cable path from the display to the booth in each screen, and that the mounting hardware for the display is installed in each screen.
--jhawk
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