Why are my Digital NLE Captions not working?

Below are a couple of basic problem solving suggestions to help you get your Digital NLE Captions working.

First and foremost, go back to known good – a black QuickTime MOV that you know works. Make sure you use the same codec as you requested from our system (e.g. Testing the animation codec may give different row/column than the ProRes 422). Pull it into your current NLE project and see if you see captions on a monitor connected directly to the composite, SDI, or S-video output. Are the captions at the same row/column that you expected them?

The settings may change any time either your hardware driver changes or your NLE changes…

Check the Field Dominance in your project. Some users have reported that changes to that have caused problems.

Check where you placed the black QuickTime MOV in your project. Some users have reported that moving it down one pixel suddenly fixes results which did not otherwise work.

Some deck have DIP switches which disable the caption data writing to the deck.

Some Final Cut Pro/AJA Kona card combinations appear to have a problem whereby everything works as expected when you print-to-tape with the black MOV on the timeline, but does not work when you crop out the 720×480 picture area.

The solution is to request the QuickTime Animation codec which the alpha channel and the 720×480 picture area already clear, thereby eliminating the need to crop.