Convert Hard Subs to Soft Subs?

[Startropic1]

I have two versions of some videos. One set is english audio and no subtitles, the other set is the japanese audio with hard english subtitles. My goal is to make dual audio videos with soft subs. So basically, I have clean video in one set and all I need is to make soft subs from the hard subbed videos. Is there any way to do this outside manually typing what I see on the screen as I watch the hard subs?

[aedipuss]

much easier to just download subs. search for the movie + subtitles

[jman98]

It can be done, but you will need a program that is capable of doing OCR to get the hardcoded subs from the video. I have never done this so I don't remember which of the subtitle programs in our Tools section can do this (I mean do OCR on hardcoded subs), but I know that at least one of them is supposed to be able to do it. You really shouldn't have to type in everything as the OCR should remember each character after you enter it, but the process is a bit time consuming and it could easily take you an hour or maybe more to do this.

[Hoser Rob]

I'd definitely try option 1 first. opensubtitles.org and subscene.com are the only sub sites I've ever found that were worth a damn. smplayer will search opensubtitles while you're watching the video, download them, and rename them to match the video file name. Pretty convenient.

You may need option 2 though. Since foreign releases aren't put on dvd in English versions nearly as much as just a couple of years ago I'm having a lot more trouble finding subs lately. One French movie, the only english subs I could find were Polish ran through one of those translation programs. And we all know how well those work ... I may as well have just watched it in french.

I don't know which tool it is either, but go ahead and look it up. I suspect it would take a bit of time to work. But it'd be better than typing it in yourself and then running a sub editor program to sync the subs to the video.

[fritzi93]

Easier by far to download them, if you can.

I'd advise you to load any downloaded subs into SubtitleEdit and check for errors, line by line. If they're substantially correct, it won't take as long as it sounds. A couple I downloaded, it was like the fool who did them just hit "skip" whenever OCR flagged a line for errors. So I decided from then on I'd just do them myself.

OCR (optical character recognition) is always iffy. Moreso when reading italics, in my experience.

In your case, it's well worth downloading them if they're available.

[Startropic1]

Been a while, but this isn't the only project I'm working on. Anyway, I have kept my eye open for separate subtitles to download, or atleast a softsubbed release but I've come across neither. These videos are an anime series from back in the 1980s, and hard to come by in any form. Suffice it to say, neither the english audio or the subs are really top quality, but it's what I have to work with.