Last updated: 2020

Caption Policy

Where possible, RPGPN will try to ensure that videos have correct subtitles in the primary video language

Translation Policy

Due to time and resource restraints, it is currently not possible for any RPGPN video to have non-primary language translations upon release. However, if you are a gracious member of the community fluent in another language and wish to assist in translation of a video, please contact us at hello [at] rpgpn [dot] co [dot] uk, and we can provide the source video file and primary video language subtitles

Captioning Guide

We base our guidelines on the BBC’s Subtitle Guidelines (version 1.1.8 at the time of writing) with changes as outlined below. (We ignore Section 20 Children’s Subtitling as none of our content is aimed at children.)

Where possible, examples of videos using certain methods will be linked.

We highly recommend reading and understanding this document fully before submitting to ensure your captions can be processed faster

Changes

7 Identifying Speakers

Colour should be the primary way of identifying different speakers.

Part 7.2 should never be used and is considered bad practice.

7.1 Use Colour

Hopefully, in our videos, it shouldn’t be too difficult to assign each speaker a different colour.

If there is a narrator, then yellow should be used, however, don’t feel required to reserve this colour in a video that has no narrator, in fact, it gets used for myself in the old Skyblock videos.

7.7 Arrows for off-screen voices

As most of our content is gaming, where you probably can’t see people anyway, this is redundant, however is not excluded for the possibility that it might eventually be needed on a different channel.

The BBC suggest using ← and →, however, we prefer < and > as they’re simpler and what a viewer coming from TV would expect.

8 Colour

8.3 Speaker Colours

A list of recommended colours is provided herein.

Also in this table is colour guidance for when 2 or more RPGPN members are present in a video on a channel complying to this document.

This is only fully required on the RPGPN, RPGPN TV, Noobay, Noobay Stream Archive, Ponkey364 and PonkeyVlogs channels and not for anyone else who may decide to implement these guidelines, obviously

9 Typography

9.1 Fonts

As we’re only online, please just specify the font as SansSerif, the user can override this in their player if they want, and, as the BBC note:

Use of non-platform fonts can adversely impact clarity of presented text.

21 Live Subtitling

This currently isn’t applicable because:

1. We don’t stream much
2. That’s quite difficult

File Format

Captions should be created following using TTML standard. Applications that can export this format include Apple’s Final Cut Pro X ¹ (for macOS) and Subtitle Edit (for Windows)

Sections 22-27 are therefore redundant and should not be used.