Problem importing Russian subtitles into Adobe Encore

[adanepst1]

Dear Forum members,

I have subtitles in English and Russian for a DVD project (two separate DVDs, one in each language), to be realized with Adobe Encore. The subtitles were done with Media Subtitler.

Everything went perfectly well with the English subtitles - with Media Subtitler, I converted the SubRip file into Adobe Encore (TXT) format, then imported the subtitles into Adobe Encore. There were no problems at all.

With the Russian subtitles: first of all there seems to be a bug in Media Subtitler, since when I tried to convert the SubRip file into Adobe Encore format, the Russian characters were lost and replaced by all sorts of strange characters. (Of course I checked all the settings within Media Subtitler - the Cyrillic character set, etc.). As soon as I re-opened, in Media Subtitler, the file I had just converted, the Russian characters were lost. Opening the file with Microsoft Word and selecting the "Cyrillic" format gave the same result, so it seems indeed to be a bug.

This bug I was able to get around by downloading a different program that correctly converted the Russian subtitles from SubRip to Adobe Encore format. Now when I opened the new Adobe Encore subtitle file in Media Subtitler, all the Russian text was there.

That problem being solved, I am faced with a new problem: Adobe Encore is unable to import this Adobe Encore file. This time I did not see the result personally as it is a colleague who is doing the work with Adobe Encore and I was not with him when he tried. He told me that the message he gets is that it is impossible to import the file, and it is necessary to save it in UTF-8 or UTF-16 format. I tried saving the file (using Microsoft Word) in Cyrillic (Windows) text format; trying to import it in Adobe Encore, my colleague said it gave him the same error message. Of course UTF-8 and UTF-16 are not going to work for Cyrillic characters.

I would be very grateful for any help.

Thank you very much,

Aaron

[jman98]

I have never worked with Encore or Media Subtitler, but I'm one of the few forum members with any Cyrillic subtitle experience. What I have to say may or may not help, but I think at least trying to help you is better than nothing.

One of the problems I have seen with non-Latin based character sets is that all the subtitle programs I've ever used don't support Unicode. I needed to scan some Russian subtitles off a DVD that I own and save them to a text file. To get it to work, I had to go into the Control Panel in XP and go to Regional and Language Options -> Advanced. Then where it says "Select a language to match the language version of the non-Unicode programs you want to use" I had to pick "Russian" and re-boot. That made my subtitle programs work with Russian subtitles. You may have to do something similar.

[adanepst1]

Thanks very much for the tip!

What I was finally able to do was to copy the text (in Adobe Encore format) from Microsoft Word, paste it in Notepad, and from Notepad, save it in UTF-8 format. Now it works!

Warmest wishes,

Aaron