I got several request last year on how to change subtitles to review them to spell check them and so on. I decided to create a little free app which might help there. It's called gText.
gText is thought to modify or check Final Cut Pro XML files for subtitles. Subtitles are always annoying, disturbing the picture. So they have to be as good as possible, which means some rules need to be followed.
gText (at current release) doesn't take care of timing in a way that that you can modify in and out -- it's more about text only.
You can import a Final Cut Pro XML and gText will search the XML for all text generators which do have one text entry. This means that generators like 'Lower Third' or many of the Motion templates will be ignored.
Though you can import a whole project it is recommend to use a sequence XML.
gText will calculate the line width for each paragraph of every subtitle based upon a user selected length. This length can be different for different types of target formats. Film for example prefers 40 characters per line, with EBU files there might be 50 or 52, others prefer different counts of characters per line. The character count does include spaces.
Also the amount of paragraphs will be listed for each title, as these might be important for your release.
gText will also retrieve the duration of each of those subtitles and calculate a suggested duration based on a user selected minimum and maximum duration. Sometimes subtitles might be too short, other times they might be too long -- but latter might be slates.
There is also a calculation of a suggested duration based upon a user selected "characters per second" speed.
There is no website but a PDF
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www.spherico.com]
Andreas
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