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Vendor Acquisition: Conducting Your Needs Assessment

When assessing your captioning needs, here are some considerations:

Does the vendor have experience with postproduction captioning (as opposed to realtime or live captioning)?
Are you seeking to caption just one program or a series of programs? If you contract for multiple programs you may be able to negotiate a volume discount.
How long is the program? If you have multiple programs, are they all the same length or of varying lengths?
What is your expected turnaround time between delivering the completed video and when you need to receive the caption file? Faster turnarounds can lead to increased costs.
What is your display environment? This defines the caption file format you want from the vendor. For example, will you be presenting the video via YouTube, a customized Flash display, or a QuickTime download? Each display has a specific format requirement for the caption file. (For more information on file formats, see Module 2.)