I wrote this response to a post over on Larry Jordan’s website about broadcast captioning.
708 embedded captions are strangely difficult and expensive to implement.
I too have tried to solve (simplify/less $) this problem for a colleague of mine for years who produces an outdoor show for regional TV. Twenty years ago they settled on the expensive MacCaption solution.
I once thought FFMEG would be the answer, no dice. I googled high and low for inexpensive software, nope.
And now my friend will be handing the program off to me and I, once again, went looking for a better way…but found very little (except for your very informative discussion post, thank you Clark..and Larry).
The outdoor show is using a very outdated MacCaption software on a very outdated iMac, so I guess I’ll keep using that until it no longer works.
On a side note, one of the better developments in the CC workflow is the way AI can effortlessly create the captions of your video, generally for free. (Which makes me think, if AI can do this on the fly, except for control, why do we even need to bother ourselves with this task!)
So, for anyone that may come across this post in the future, here are the results of my research on the topic of “Current solutions for embedding CEA-708 captions into an MXF wrapped file (Oct 2025):
Closed Caption Creator https://closedcaptioncreator.com/
Subscription based, from the demo it show a very nice one click AI captioning feature. The caveat with this service is that you have to upload your video file to their server to create the embedded file then download it back again. (which costs extra, sheesh.) For a weekly 30 minute show it works out to be almost $100/mo.
$50/mo + $2/file + $0.40/GB
Pixel Tools https://www.pixeltools.com/expert-caption.html
Windows only, Expert-Caption can caption all video files in a folder. And the processing is all done locally on the computer and not in the cloud.
$1595 one time purchase or $249/quarter ($83/mo)
CaptionMaker (Telestream, formally MacCaption)
$7403
Of course the following are full video editing software with the (reported) ability to export a file with embedded 708 captions. If you are not editing your project on these it calls for a clunky import/export exercise.
Premiere Pro (Adobe)
$23/mo (annual sub)
Avid Media Composer
$260/yr ($22/mo)
From everything I’ve read Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve can possibly do 608 but not 708.
And that’s it. For the life of me, I can not understand why this is not easily programmed into a new or existing software. But it must be voodoo, atom splitting, secret sauce or something.
Please add or comment to this list for others searching. For a law that went into effect 20 years ago, you think we would have more options. Anyway, happy captioning.
Hmmm, maybe AI can write me a program to do this…