Learning something new today

[aesmael]

Watching Bones and something is up such that I see the picture fine, music is heard, sound effects are heard, but not voice. So it seems voice is transmitted in a separate track to other components of the broadcast?

Some checking revealed voice was audible on a different version of the channel so it seemed more likely to be a transmission problem than a matter of settings on the television. Shortly after the credits voice returned to the channel in question accompanied by a puzzling flickering of the captions when they appear. My guess is someone at the station managed to fix the problem, perhaps by adding the voice track to the broadcast a second time - if the captions are carried on the same track as the voices being captioned that might explain the flickering since they are appearing on screen twice.

But, I don't know enough about television to be confident in this. In fact, I would be surprised if I learned I was correct in these conclusions, since why would the distributors deliver episodes to television networks in pieces to be assembled in broadcast? Although there is that tendency to overlay things like ads and voiceovers onto programs, but I don't think that is the same thing.

So, I've had some ideas but I don't know what is actually going on or why. Interesting error though.

Comments

[jenndolari.livejournal.com]

Dunno if Captions are handled the same way on PAL TVs as they are NTSC TVs, but the captions are usually attatched to the video signal not the audio. The data sits in an non-viewable part of the screen. Not sure what was going on the video. :)