Apple - Final Cut Pro - Closed Captions (10.4.1)
“Final Cut Pro now includes an intuitive, comprehensive set of tools for closed captioning, without the need for expensive third-party software or services. You can create, view, and edit captions within Final Cut Pro, and deliver them as part of your video or as a separate file.” (credit: Apple)
Our Role
On the video apps design team, our primary responsibility was the timeline. For the closed captions feature, we were assigned as the visual design DRI (directly responsible individual), working with the interaction design DRI, to define the visual language for the closed captioning UI, and work closely with engineering to implement it in code.
Background
Building tools that enable accessibility is one of the core tenets of Apple’s design philosophy. The video apps group looked at the current captioning workflow of our customers. It relied on other applications and services beyond Final Cut Pro X, and as a result was complicated and expensive.
By building the ability to add captions right into Final Cut Pro, it saved our customers a lot of time and effort, and it reduced the barrier to entry for content creators to add captioning to their projects.
Outcome
The caption objects live directly within the timeline, they have a distinct lavender color palette that features black text–this is to help differentiate the caption objects from ordinary video, audio, or title objects. The caption role lanes are always anchored to the top of the timeline pane and persists regarding of vertical scroll position. The thinking was that when a user is in the captioning workflow, they will always want to see the caption objects in context of the rest of the timeline.
We added margins on top of the caption role lanes for the header labels; while this affects the vertical spacing between timeline objects, it ensured that the role lane headers were visible at all times.
Import Captions
Create Captions
Edit Captions
Deliver Captions
Captioning Verification
Indicating potential errors (or violation of captioning protocol) was a key requirement. The captioning verification system, built right into macOS and Final Cut Pro X dynamically verifies the parameters of the captions against captioning standards and indicate errors (i.e. too many characters, overlapping captions in a single frame).
Multi-Language
One of the primary goals for the visual design of Captions in the app was to ensure that the active language/format was instantly recognizable. This mockup was testing the legibility of the design direction, while also making sure that existing timeline object states (i.e. disabled) stays legible as well.
Role Lane Headers
Here, we have three design directions to always have the Role Lane Headers be visible in the Timeline. Role Lanes (introduced as a part of the Magnetic Timeline 2 in Final Cut Pro 10.3) keep the Timeline objects organized by Roles, which are metadata tags applied to every object imported into Final Cut Pro, that keeps objects organized by role (i.e. Video, Dialogue, Music, Sound Effects, etc.).