Best way to subtitle on Premiere?

I was just in your situation a few days ago. I actually came across this thread as I was trying to figure it out. I had about four minutes of English interviews to put subtitles in Mandarin Chinese for. I just had to use titles and it was a bit of a pain. First I used Speech Analysis to transcribe, then I fixed all of it that was wrong. Then I sent it to the student I was working with, she translated it, separated by the blocks that I broke them down into. And then I put them in as titles.

If I had found a viable way to put the .srt file into Premiere, I probably would have just hired a freelancer I found on odesk.com who would translate and put it into Subtitle Workshop (http://www.urusoft.net/products.php?cat=sw). But I searched a lot, and just found a few programs, at $1500 to more. So after a few hours of trying to find something viable, I gave in and just went with titles.
 
rawfa said:
Nobody? Come on, I cannot be the only person in this situation...
So far I´m exporting the video from premiere, then I import it to subtitling program that generates an SRT file when I´m done, and then I have to import the premiere file and the SRT to another program and reencode everything together. Not practical at all.
Click to expand...

No. You are not the only person to have this problem... I have it as well... but I've found no 'simple' solution. 2 years ago at NAB I saw only one 'captioning' application company and a few 'services'. All were mega bux (relative to my nolo budget...) packages.

This year at NAB there were about 5 or 6 booths that were promoting some form of 'captioning' software, but still in the mega bux for me category...

I've been taking an American Sign Language class this semester with the Wife and due to needing to teach her remedial English... along with keeping up the motivation for the ASL... I have not had time to look into this beyond the very primitive methods of using Quicktime and a text file with timecode+captions_text to combine into one 'playable' media file, and obviously requiring the QT player.

Vimeo does have an API for programming javascript + HTML5 to allow users to write javascript code and do 'creative' things with media stored on Vimeo... but for me the API does not go far enough to do what I need to do, for creating the WebVTT (similar to the SRT files... but for 'web' apps...) formatted files for use with HTML5 video capabilities. However, I think the API would allow a user to create a portal page that does present captions via the WebVTT format, for streams that are hosted on Vimeo.

I'll be looking into this further, but at the moment, I think you've seen the problems I've seen for some time... like a long time... about captioning and 'ordinary users' creating captioned content. In the olden days captions were encoded into the video signal, in NTSC lands the caption 'data' was encoded on line 22 of the NTSC video signal, and as such, required special hardware in addition to any creation, editing, or timing of the captions.

As a note, I'm using 'captions' and 'subtitles' interchangibly as for me they are equivalent... From a technical point of view getting 'text on the screen' is the issue, whether it is for 'translation' of the dialog, or presentation for deaf or hard of hearing, is immaterial.
 
sorry to bring up a dead issue but am having a very similar issue. it seems there are NO good subtitling solutions from start to finish.. granted, I havent tried the 'mega-expensive' ones, but I can't even find demos of those. So i'd like to summarize the problems i've had...
1 - putting subtitles in. I am working on a doc that' half english and half russian. Initially I realized there's no way to do subs in Premiere short of a title per sub, but with over 700 titles, that would get completely ludicrous.
2 - existing software has AWFUL interfaces. What I wanted is this - create a subtitles by just typing into a box and then drag it around a timeline to adjust in/out points .. that's it (much like the interface of Premiere once the title is actually there). I couldn't find a software that would let you do this easily or intelligently. I ended up doing all the titles in InqScribe since that could at least generate .srt for me. I subsequently used Aegissub to sync the titles, but the interface here leaves much to be desired as well.
3 - (and this is my current issue) - I can't find software that'll master the subtitles onto the video and NOT look awful. I tried Encore since I'm on CS6. It easily imports SRT files (though with some timing issues, but this is not a major problem for me). But the rendering is just horrendous. The text is not anti-aliased, and the aliasing is something really strange. I then spent about 3 hours searching for the elusive "image script" format and some software to do that with, and after finally generating pretty .png titles, was excited to import them.. only to find out that Encore makes them look EVEN WORSE than the text.

So .. what are all the major studios using for subs? I don't remember subtitles every looking awful in a film, but at the same time I cannot find software that will do them justice. if any of you can answer any of the 3, I'd be very grateful.
 
Of course, if you really was total control over your titles you should do what I do. Use the title function and just create title pages. It's the fastest way to make adjustmets later if you want to lengthen or shorten them or if you want to resize them. Once the track is imbedded you can even change the colour - opacity - size - position anytime you want.
 
Amadou said:
Of course, if you really was total control over your titles you should do what I do. Use the title function and just create title pages. It's the fastest way to make adjustmets later if you want to lengthen or shorten them or if you want to resize them. Once the track is imbedded you can even change the colour - opacity - size - position anytime you want.
Click to expand...

The problem with this approach is that
1 - it takes WAY too long in premiere CS6 .. the titler is by far the worst feature of the program. It hasn't been updated in like 10 years (more?) and is not well suited for this task
and
2 - that means the subs are burned in and the user will have no way to turn them off if desired. In my case, I may want the user to have English subs, Russian subs, both or none
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top