Create own Subtitles

[kerpal]

Hey Everyone,

I was hoping you guys could point me in the right direction of creating subtitles for my own films. I do a lot of short films in SoCal and I hit the festival market year round, but I need to start getting subtitles (english, spanish, etc) so I can start submitting internationally. Do any of you guys recommend a certain method, etc of making your own subtitles for films?

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

Eric T. Edwards
www.ecpfilms.com

[Jeremiah58]

If you are going to translate dialogs, then I would recommend VisualSubSync. It's a freeware and extremely easy to use.
A bit better tool for making subtitles out of scratch, but not a freeware, though... is DVD Architect.
Both tools allow previewing of audio timeline, so that text can be precisely synchronized with dialog.

[DereX888]

What kind of subtitles?
Its a very vague and broad question youre asking...
"Burned-in" in the picture directly on your DV AVI, or as an addition to the DVD with your movie?
For the latter: Subtitle Workshop.
Works great with DV AVI and probably any other format.
When you make your DVD for festival submission, depending on the tools you use - find the one that make automatically subtitle bitmaps from the text file created by SW and include them in the DVD's stream. Many many tools can do this during authoring.
For adding "burned-in" subtitles to your DV AVI you need to add them during reencoding with the capable tool of your choice (i.e. VirtualDub with subtitles plugin can do this), but of course you have to create the subtitles first (Subtitle Workshop again).

Adding selectable subtitles to DVD or 'burned-in' to your AVI is easy.
No matter which option (subtitles) youre asking about, Im sure we have at least few guides available, just dig our How To / All Guides / ... section.
Its the translating process itself thats time-consuming and unfortunately cannot be automated...
SW isnt the easiest at first, but once you try it out and get the hold of it - you won't use any other tool to do translations.

[kerpal]

Thank you DereX888 and Jeremiah58 for the reponses. Sorry about the vaque question as well, I actually kept it vaque to get peoples opinions on just good subtitle programs in general.

Basically I just want subtitles for DVD, not for AVI's or for that matter Hardsubed on there. I have just tried VisualSubSync and I got it down, its very easy to use in my opinion.

Basically I just want to Add english, spanish, etc subs to my DVD author and thats it, would VisualSubSync allow me to do this after I finish making these subtitles, I know in that program, after you are done, you export it out to a file, and I assume you just import this file into your DVD authoring program of choice and you have your subtitles?

Anyhow, that is what I need it for, does it seem that I am on the right track?

[Jeremiah58]

Basically I just want to Add english, spanish, etc subs to my DVD author and thats it, would VisualSubSync allow me to do this after I finish making these subtitles, I know in that program, after you are done, you export it out to a file,

When you start working in VisualSubSync, it creates a project, based on input files. It creates .srt subtitle file and all you have to do is marking a time for each subtitle line (on audio timeline) and translate that part of a dialog, and so on until you reach the end of your video. Needless to say, you have to use "Save" or "Save as" command each time you are about to close the program.

...and I assume you just import this file into your DVD authoring program of choice and you have your subtitles?
Anyhow, that is what I need it for, does it seem that I am on the right track?

Yes, but some DVD authoring programs are particular about a subtitle format. You can convert .srt format in any other format, using Subtitle Workshop.

[kerpal]

Oh ok, great news then, i'll go ahead and make my subtitles in VisualSubSync for the time being, if I happen to run into issues authoring with it, i'll convert those via Subtitle Workshop and what not.

Thanks everyone for the help.

[AngelaMoore]

Thank you so much for helping me deciding which software I should use.

I know it is a bit old topic, but still it was helpful for me to create subtitles for some videos I have created. Subtitle Workshop simply works great even today. I found it very useful and easy to use.

[snafubaby]

I am wondering if you could use speech recognition software (Naturally Speaking, or maybe even google voice on your android phone) and record the audio of a movie, and then go through the process of getting the timing right and make subtitles for a movie. Anyone think this would be possible? I know some of the speech recognition software titles aren't perfect, but it seems like they do a pretty good job of recognizing words. There is a website that downloads youtube videos called keepvid.com and they just recently implemented a new feature. You can download subtitles from any youtube video. I don't know how it works. I tried it for ONE video that i downloaded from youtube, and a lot of the words were incorrectly recognized. Maybe they will eventually find a way to make it happen where it works great.

[Baldrick]

Maybe you could upload to youtube and use their speech recognition. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3038280?hl=en

I don't know if it's possible to save it though...

[Baldrick]

Doesn't most recognition software require some training for good results? And no background noise/music.

Yep, youtube recognition is far from perfect.

[snafubaby]

Yes, Baldrick, any speech recognition software requires you to train it to recognize certain words. I've used Naturally Speaking and it kept misspelling certain words, while always recognizing others. I don't know if there will ever be a program that will correctly recognize ALL words everytime. It makes you wonder how they subtitle DVD's and Blu Ray discs. It must be a painstaking process. Watching youtube videos with closed caption (cc) on is hiliarious at times. The words that you see on the screen are quite funny.

[smrpix]

I don't know if there will ever be a program that will correctly recognize ALL words everytime.

..in all languages. Yes, that's the "holy grail."

It makes you wonder how they subtitle DVD's and Blu Ray discs. It must be a painstaking process.

Yep. Even if you're working from a script. When you include the emotional impact of timings and syntax and how to break up a line it's actually a highly-skilled and creative job at the top levels.