Subtitle question

[rhegedus]

I've got a 16 year old recording of a French film called Les Ripoux (aka Le Cop) on VHS that was broadcast un the UK with English subtitles. I don't think the tape has fared well over the years enough to warrant a capture and conversion to DVD.

There is a French DVD version of it available, but it has no English subtitles.

So here's the plan: Buy the DVD and rip it to HD, then manually add the subtitles for the whole film myself (i.e. type them all out from the VHS version) and re-author and burn.

What is the best way of adding the subtitles onto the video stream?

[SaSi]

I've done a similar "project" with a badly subtitled movie I got. I used the English subtitles as a basis and translated them to Greek.

The hardest part is to time and sync the subtitles with the movie, so since you can use the french version, you can start with a timed set of subpictures.

In general terms, the sequence I suggest is the following:

Rip the DVD onto HD and demux the video and audio tracks. Re-encode if you want to reduce size.

Alternativelly, if you can first DVDShrink if the movie isn't much larger than 4.36Gb and then demux video and audio tracks.

The second step is to rip the existing subtitles. You need to use a subtitle ripper. I use Subrip v.1.14 or 1.16. You need to create SSA script, so it involves a somewhat time consuming step to OCR the font first.

At this stage you will have a subtitle script with french, a video stream (MPEG-2) and an Audio stream (probably AC3).

You need to use notpad or someting to translate the script. You may want to view the VHS versions to help you with translation.

Once you are done, you need to use MaestroSBT to render the SSA script into subpictures and a subpicture script to import to the authoring program. I have used Scenarist for my project so I generated a Scenarist script. It can also generate DVDMaestro scripts.

It is also possible (haven't done it) to convert these scripts into IFOEdit compatible subtitle script.

Which means you can either use IFOEdit, DVDMaestro or Scenarist to re-author the DVD. Authoring a single movie with an audio track and a subpicture track should be straightforward.

As said, the above are just the main steps to take. If it's your first time with any of them, each can become an adventure by itself. If you stuble across anything, post a question.

Possible problems are:
How to use MaestroSBT in the first place (took me quite a few rendering attempts before getting placement, colours and font size right).
How to convert the rendered subpicture stream script and subpictures into IFOEdit compatible. I'm sure there are a couple of relevant postings there.
How to OCR with subrip. It get's tricky, especially if you are unfamiliar with the language, but I wouldn't be too worried with this. All you need is the timing and some broad understanding of what the subpicture contains.

Good luck.

[rhegedus]

That's an awful lot of software I don't have

I was thinking along the lines of doing an overlay of each set of subtitles onto the video stream with white text on a transparent background - like superimposing a jpeg with writing on a transparent background onto the video.

[TomSem]

or you can dl the subs if someone already tranlated it for you
maybe sync with ac3 with subcreator
convert to sup with srt2sup
and then inport into ifoedit author

good luck

[SaSi]

Sorry if the work appears a lot - and it is - but as you said (in two lines) yourself:

So here's the plan: Buy the DVD and rip it to HD, then manually add the subtitles for the whole film myself (i.e. type them all out from the VHS version) and re-author and burn.

I was merely "expanding" your plan into the separate steps you need to make.

If you can find (or type) the subtitles in .srt format, then you can use VirtualDUB and the VOSUB filter plug-in to permanently burn the subtitles onto the movie. It's much less work but I wouldn't like to permanently burn the movie with subtitles.

[rhegedus]

Hey Sasi, thanks for the reply- sorry I didn't get back sooner.

I've decided to add the subtitles using Vegas Video 4 since the original DVD didn't have any subtitles on it at all so my timing has to be done visually - very time consuming, but will get the desired result.

My problems begin before that though, as I'm trying to convert VOB to DV to import into Vegas without having to encode to avi or mpeg first. Doesn't seem to be a straight forward way of doing it, only a few work-arounds.

What fun

[Milo]

1/
" then manually add the subtitles for the whole film myself (i.e. type them all out from the VHS version) and re-author and burn."

Don't waste your time. You can easily find the french subtitle, and with the right timings


2/
"I've decided to add the subtitles using Vegas Video 4... I'm trying to convert VOB to DV to import into Vegas without having to encode to avi or mpeg first"

WOW, that's a weird way to re-author a DVD
BTW, the video stream of a VOB file is MPEG2...

You just need to demux VOBs, get french subtitle, convert it to subpicture (.sup) then re-author (remux) streams with .sup to get new VOBs ready to be burnt.

You need for example these FREE softwares :
VobEdit -> demux VOBs
str2sup -> convert .srt downloaded subtitles to .sup
IfoEdit -> re-author DVD including .sup subtitle track

Optionnally, you might verify the subtitle timings with Subtitle Workshop.

[rhegedus]

There is no French subtitle on the disk!

[Milo]

I understood there's no french subtitles on the disk, but there's on the net.

[rhegedus]

Where? It might save me some time but then again, I'm begining to like my method

[SaSi]

I understood there's no french subtitles on the disk, but there's on the net.

Don't want to point the finger here, but I wonder whether downloading subtitles from the internet fits into the "warez" clause. Frankly speaking, as adding subtitles from scratch is a hell of a work to do, and since so much material is available, I tend to consider that this has been collected from ripping DVDs and posting the ASCII files on the net; hence I would consider this discussion drifting into the warez genre.

Just a word of caution to you guys...

[Milo]

I would consider that posting subtitles on the net might be warez stuff, since it seems that movie dialogues are copyright.

However, I would not consider that downloading such subtitles fit in warez stuff when you have recorded a TV version with these subtitles AND have bought the DVD.