Blog
Leer en españolNotes from the booth
Writing for the people who actually run the show. How captions reach a switcher, what translation costs, and which accessibility rules genuinely apply to a live event.
Guides
Set SCAPTION up with the software you already work with.
- OBS StudioDistroAV, the NDI source and the room screen.
- vMixNDI input, Overlay and the room output.
- TriCasterNDI source and a DSK layer.
- Blackmagic ATEMHDMI with chroma key, keyed in ATEM Software Control.
- ZoomCaptions in Zoom's own caption bar.
- Teams, Meet and WebexCaption an online meeting without a bot in the call.
Related reading:
- How to put live captions on your switcher: OBS, vMix, TriCaster and ATEM
- Captioning a Zoom or Teams meeting without putting a bot in the call
Reference: What is alpha-channel NDI captioning? (And why it beats burn-in)
Latest posts
- Guide
How to measure live caption latency, and why vendor figures do not help
Providers quote the fastest segment of a pipeline that has four. What each segment costs, how to measure the one your audience actually experiences, and the number that matters on a venue screen.
- Guide
AI minutes: what they can do with an event transcript, and what they cannot
Automatic minutes are genuinely useful and routinely oversold. What a model can reliably extract from eight hours of speech, what it drops, and the two design decisions that decide which.
- Guide
What to actually specify when you tender for language access
Most tenders for captioning and translation specify the wrong things. The clauses that decide whether the delivered system works, and the four questions that separate a real answer from a compliant one.
- Guide
Captioning a Zoom or Teams meeting without putting a bot in the call
There are two ways to get live captions out of an online meeting: join it as a participant, or listen to the audio the host's computer is already playing. The second needs nobody's permission.
- Guide
Where caption accuracy is actually won: ten minutes before the event
Proper nouns, brands and acronyms are what a live caption system gets wrong, and the fix happens before you go on air, not during. How a custom vocabulary works and what to put in it.
- Guide
Five hundred phones on venue Wi-Fi: what breaks first, and how to stop it
If your audience reads captions on their own phones, the access point fails before anything else. What actually breaks at a conference, what to ask the venue, and what to do when the answer is bad.
- Accessibility
Event accessibility in Europe: what actually applies to your conference
The European Accessibility Act, EN 301 549 and public procurement rules explained for event organisers. What genuinely obliges you to caption, and what is good practice rather than law.
- Guide
What simultaneous interpretation equipment actually costs, line by line
Booths, transmitters, receivers and the people who hand them out: what each line of an interpretation quote is for, why the third language breaks the budget, and what you can stop renting.
- Comparison
AI live translation vs human interpreters: an honest comparison
What simultaneous interpretation actually costs per language per day, where AI translation wins, and the events where you should still hire a human interpreter.
- Guide
How to put live captions on your switcher: OBS, vMix, TriCaster and ATEM
Five practical ways to get real-time captions onto a live event feed (alpha NDI into OBS or vMix, chroma-key HDMI into a Blackmagic ATEM, a chroma-key URL in a browser, the platform's own captions, attendees' phones) and the trade-offs of each.