Hi Ben,
Most of the work I've done with captioning up til now has been SRT*. It is "stupidly simple": a line number, a time range in HR:MN:SC,ms format, good for any frame rate and up to two lines of text (followed by another newline), but always in 5 line blocks of text only. It also seems to be the most prevalent form of CC. Since it is so widespread in usage, I thought it would be convenient to be able to import them into FCPX. SCC is off-the-charts complicated, luckily, FCPX will already import SCC files. ITT format is the next most simple format I've seen mainly because it's in readable XML and it's a simplified version of the cea-608 spec. FCPX converts readily back and forth from ITT and 608 (and that's a good thing).
About an hour after I posted my request, I figured out that simply converting to 608 and back to ITT restores the black strip backgrounds for ITT. It's a little ridiculous, and was hoping for a "better way" but it works. I can just make a note of it in my instructions that changing formats back and forth will fix the problem or simply import as ITT and convert to 608. There are much better controls over the 608 captioning anyway, including the Text Background Color option (which appears to be *missing* from the ITT options!) Restarting FCPX does not seem to fix the problem of missing black backgrounds (I only just launched FCPX after today's startup...)
Guess it's feedback time...
I'll get back with a link if you'd like to try out the SRT converter when I've finished it (I need to move it to another site.)
Thanks for your suggestion.
*before CC support, if I needed to I would run an SRT through Textwrangler and strip out all the line numbers and timing lines (regex) and save the file as a "manuscript"; import that file into Motion and keyframe the lines for subtitles - a little time consuming, but easy.
