Subtitling video advice

[jgharding]

Hi everyone,

I have a video edit in Premiere, and I'm hunting for a quick way to turn a transcript into a set of subtitles... short of just creating an individual Title for each few lines, I can't work it out!

Does anyone have any tips at all?

Many thanks,

JG

[Jon de Zwaan]

I've got no experience with it, but maybe you could search on google for 'hardcode subtitles'. I think you need to turn the script into a subtitle file first in order to succeed, but as I said before, I've got no experience in this method.

Good luck!

[Willian Aleman]

TitleExchange for Mac will do what you are asking for. I don't know if they have a Windows version.

[xenogears]

I you need to create the subs from scratch:
-Subtitle Workshop on PC
-Subs Factory on Mac

To import to Premiere Pro:
-EZTitles

Another option look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LAnZPDUOiI

Good luck.

[Ernesto Mantaras]

I recommend you use VisualSubSync ([url="http://www.visualsubsync.org/"]http://www.visualsubsync.org/[/url])to do the subtitles. It's so intuitive to work with, and it's graphical (you directly set subtitles and duration dragging the mouse over the video's waveform and then create them pressing Ctrl+W and just write!). It's the fastes process you'll ever get. I even enjoy doing the subtitles.

You have to do the subtitles first, you'll get an .srt file and then my process is to use Lemony Pro (following these instructions: [url="https://vimeo.com/11896354"]https://vimeo.com/11896354[/url]) to generate a subtitle video with an alpha channel that I then place on top of the original video. Now, EZTitles seems to be much more practical, but I haven't used it. I will give that one a try as soon as I can!

[jgharding]

I do like the metadata based workflow of that video post, though as this is a translation, I'd have to see if bridge or a similar piece of software will allow me to manually attach Text XMP data to then be used by the AE script... hmmm... I'll give it a shot...

[Paul Tuersley]

That metadata solution has a big limitation in that it doesn't preserve the original lines of text. It's just a set number of words per line regardless of which subtitle they belong to.

If you have access to After Effects and get the subtitles into the .srt format (i.e. mark them up in something like Aegisub), I've developed a script that imports them into AE. From there you can drag the composition straight into Premiere using Dynamic Link.
http://aescripts.com/pt_importsubtitles/

[Ernesto Mantaras]

That's a cool script. Very very useful. However, I saw a video you made in the AEScripts YouTube channel, and was wondering if there's a way to make the anchor point stay in the lower side of the text instead of the center? Because the way subtitles usually work (or at least that's how I usually see them) is that it always stays inside the safe margins, and having the anchor point in the lower end allows it to always be stuck to that margin. Whenever there are two lines of text, the first line actually stacks onto the one below without changing position, the space on the screen that the text occupies grows up, not up and down.

I don't know if I'm making myself clear...

EDIT: I now watched the v1.3 video and I saw there's a Vertical Align option. I guess that does the job. Never mind!
Great script.

[jgharding]

Thanks for the help so far, I'll have a play today! The situation is: shooting a debate overseas, the debate will be transcribed while I edit, I'll receive a raw transcription as a text document.

If I receive as just a word file I have to do it manually either way, whether making SRT or pasting into titles.

However, if I can get the person transcribing to write into a different format, Excel sheet etc, perhaps we can save a huge amount of time? Any thoughts as to what I should ask for?

[jgharding]

Edit: I worked out my query.It's real easy. If you have a twitter lemme know and I'll share this solution!

[Axel]

[quote name='jgharding' timestamp='1351244027' post='20338']If I receive as just a word file I have to do it manually either way, whether making SRT or pasting into titles.

However, if I can get the person transcribing to write into a different format, Excel sheet etc, perhaps we can save a huge amount of time? Any thoughts as to what I should ask for?
[/quote]

We did this with five languages for an eighteen minute interview last weekend (185 subtitles, some languages needed more, some less, hard to automate if you ask me), Excel columns, also with a chinese version. Stupid copy&paste affair. The first version took five hours. Then we saved the project as archive and pasted the corresponding text rows into the existing title, three hours for the second version. The last version that made the biggest headache, chinese of course, took only about 90 minutes. Chinese looks so condensed, astonishing. Everything already checked and okayed. I guess for someone with little experience this was yet the fastest way. Anyway the safest. What takes most time is timing, and for that you need to see the text together with the video, at least once.