Adding subtitles to a DVD

M

markyf

Well-known member
I'm sorry I don't have many details to provide. A friend has a friend who has an 83 minute film in french on DVD and doesn't want to pay the going rate for having subtitles added. I'm sure some shop quoted her thousands.

I'm trying to figure out if I can help her and make a bit of coin on the side. I'm using Final Cut 6.03. I don't know anything about her DVD, what format it's in or what formats it could even be in.

Not knowing the details yet, how hard would it be in principle to import an 83 minute DVD, lay down the subtitles (which I'm guessing are typed out and I could just copy and past) and export it back to the same DVD format? How many hours would this take ballpark? And what would one charge an acquaintance? What are the difficulties I'm not even thinking about at this point?

Thanks for any help!
 
Typically subtitles are added in the DVD authoring process. You can read about that here.

Importing a DVD into FCP then shooting it back out to a DVD I imagine would result in a quality loss.

North america is region-1 DVDs. Europe will be a different region, so you'd need a region free DVD drive/player.

Hard to know how long it would take. You need to think about software to capture this DVD, and how much dialog there is/how much subtitling is needed, etc.

Is it possible to get the film project files? And work on it from there? It would save time, money, and quality.
 
Great. Thanks! What about doing it in Adobe Encore? Will it always be a quality loss if I need to bring the DVD into software? I will find out more details and bring them back here.
 
i'm sure Encore has as a subtitle solution, but I don't use it do i couldn't provide any details on that.

Importing the DVD, meaning converting an MPEG2 stream into an I-frame format like DVCPRO will not increase nor decrease quality, but I'd guess that making the MPEG2 for the new DVD will result in a slight loss of quality, as with any DVD. Since it has already done this process once when the original was made, doing it again will just make the quality worse.
 
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