Press & Events
EEG News
06.18.09
PSAV ENHANCES HD AND WEBCAST PRESENTATIONS WITH VERSATILE, HIGH RESOLUTION CAPTIONING SOLUTIONS FROM EEG
Top Staging Event Company Meets Heightened Expectations for Corporate Presentations by Microsoft with Hardware/Software from Captioning Experts EEG
SAN DIEGO: As HDTV takes a foothold in their homes, audience expectations for corporate presentations are continuously increasing. In order to meet and exceed these heightened standards for image quality, the national presentations services provider PSAV depends on the versatility and high resolution captioning solutions of EEG (www.eegent.com).
“The events we do are very challenging, and to be able to provide open or closed captioning is one part of the innovative services that we can bring to our clients,” says Gary Kajikawa, Project Manager for PSAV’s Show Solutions Division. “We go through every effort to provide the best possible image quality onscreen, and having clean text captioning for our clients is part of making the presentation complete.”
PSAV is often responsible for providing the full range of A/V presentation services to audiences of 1500-4000 people for shareholder meetings, seminars, sales and corporate meetings, and beyond. Kajikawa’s team may be asked by clients such as Microsoft to provide captioning for a variety of reasons, including the need for open captioning (seen by all) to display onscreen to the live in-house audience, and closed captioning (seen on demand) for a global Webcast or recording that can be distributed and viewed later on.
“Many of the events we do are for audiences worldwide,” Kajikawa says, “and our clients have found that it’s often easier to read English text than to hear what’s spoken translated with different accents. To be able to hear the presentation and read it at the same time makes it easier to understand what’s being communicated.”
Onsite at the event, the EEG HD480 Smart Encoder V HD/SD Closed Caption Server, DE280 HD Closed Caption Decoder and EN470 Smart Encoder III allow PSAV to be prepared for any captioning needs during or afterwards. In addition to the high quality onscreen display the units provide, EEG hardware and software gives Kajikawa unparalleled ease of setup, as well as the confidence that the onsite captioner will know the EEG systems, which have been firmly established as the industry standard.
“EEG was the only one that made it easy for us to do captioning onsite,” he notes. “Closed captioning devices are components that video engineers don’t use on a regular basis, and the simpler the design, the easier it is for us to set up.”
EEG’s commitment to excellent customer service – long known to broadcasters – was apparent to PSAV from early on. “The first time we used the HD480, we had a lot of programming needs onsite. EEG’s technical support staff determined they actually had to write some new software for our specific application, so they worked overnight on a weekend and emailed it to us. They never gave up.”
For the rapidly evolving open and closed captioning needs of the presentations market, EEG hardware and software are emerging as the essential solution. “At PSAV, EEG allows us to make closed captioning a small part of the event, as opposed to a large part of it,” Gary Kajikawa concludes. “I wouldn’t want to go with any other system,”