Subtitles - how?
 

The boss has told everyone it's a simple case of bringing me videos and subtitle scripts to have all of their language training videos subtitled.

oh dear :(

I've done the odd sentence here and there and an endless amount of titles, but never proper subtitling. Is there an easy way to do them, other than inserting generated text onto the timeline and then matching up the timing?

Surely there's an easier way.
Do I need a 3rd party plug-in or different piece of software.

http://www.vasst.com/product.aspx?id...e-c510a01b4d3f Subtext tool might help you.

Thanks, I'll try it and see how we get along.
Apart from using that, is the way I was doing it the same way others do it?

I also got fed up with the incredibly time-consuming process of inserting subtitles by hand and this subtext program looked like a godsend. Unfortunately I could never get it to work and it comes with no instructions or help info. If you have any luck figuring it out, please let me know what you did. Thanks. And yes, what you are doing is how I do it until I find a better, faster way.

First, my apologies for SubText not having any documentation. This is on our todo list. ;-)

For creating subtitles you can use SubText in two ways. Both involve having a text file that has one subtitle sentence on each line of the file. This is good for sending out to translators and having them return it with the translated text.

The first option is to create regions from events. SubText will import each line of the file and create a region around each event on the selected track. What you have to do to prepare for this is to split your events into sentence sized chunks before running SubText. So every time someone speaks a line, make a split just before it and that’s where SubText will place the subtitle.

The second option is to have SubText use the existing regions on the timeline. This gives you more control over the start and stop time of the subtitle. To prepare for this, create a region on the timeline every time someone says a line. Have the region’s length be the duration that you want the subtitle to remain on the screen. Then run Subtext and point to your TXT file that contains the actual subtitle text and SubText will label the regions with the subtitle text.

After using either of these options, you can use the second tab in SubText to generate the .SUB file that DVD Architect needs to create the real subtitles on the DVD.

If you are creating subtitles for several languages, then the second options is best. You place you regions once, and then run SubText with each of the translated language files and save them as DVDA .sub files.

Does this explanation help?

~jr

Thank you John, this helps a great deal! A couple of questions:

1) I don't use DVD Architect, I frameserve to Procoder or TMPGEnc and then author in DVD Lab Pro (which I believe accepts .SUB files). Do you happen to know if DVD Lab Pro will accept the .SUB files that SubText generates?

2) How/where do I control how the subtitles look - i.e. what font and color they use, dropshadow, screen placement etc.?

Thanks,

Tony

i don't think that you can change the font, etc of the subtitles. i'm not sure but i think that the DVD player just reads the text and overlays the subtitles in its own font.

Well I think I've answered my own questions. Where I'd adjust the font size, color, dropshadow etc. is in the subtitle editor in DVDLab Pro (works fine on its own internally generated subtitles).

But I just tried an experiment using Subtext and it worked fine to add the subtitles to the regions in Vegas and then I generated the .sub file.

Unfortunately, while DVDLab Pro sees the subtext .sub file and has an import .sub option, when I import the .sub file no subtitles are imported :)

Oh well, so close...

Tony, I didn’t think that DVDLab Pro uses the same SUB format as DVDA and you have proved that. I'll try and find documentation on their format and will look into adding that capability to a future version of SubText.

~jr

Thanks John, that would be very useful indeed as there are a number of us who prefer DVDLab Pro. It can import .sub, .srt, ssa, .son and .sst subtitle files if that's any help.

Tony

Thanks everyone

That gives me plenty to go on - damn this forum is good.

Is it possible to convert a SRT file to a DVD Architect Subtitle script?