again with the SUBTITLES!

i know people often ask about subtitling,
and for the most part BelleNuit gets recommended.
but i sort of get the feeling we just keep recommending that without having used it.

well i haven't used it, that's for sure,
although i like some of it's features, and in a test drive seems ok

but is there anyone out there who has actually DONE large lots of subtitling,
and what methods do you prefer?
if you've used BeleNuuit, what are your feelings?
any tricks / gotchas?

the situation is i've got 120hrs of foreign language footage (hour-age?) coming in.
it;s material to make both a DOCUMENTARY, with lots of interviews,
and a DRAMA, (which has already been cut, but i am to fine-tune, and re-cut)

the drama has a script, of course,
and so we can have quite accurate TC for each line.
the DOCO, well, it'll be a bit looser.
the director says he wants to just transcribe and subtitle the best bits.


so any experienced sub-titlers out there?
i'm not looking for tips on spotting or type aesthetics,
just ideas / experiences on the best way to get the info in

(one idea i had was to create new media with the subtitles "Burnt in" - a lot easier to cut with.)


cheers,
nick

Well, I don't have an answer, but this got me thinking:

Would it be possible for FCP to use the subtitle text as some form of metadata, that could travel with the project or media? Or maybe it would be done within Quicktime? Is this a feature request?

Some models I'm thinking of here are lyrics that become part of an mp3 file (in the ID tag), that later can be used as (pardon me) karaoke.

Sorry, not trying to hijack the thread, just seems interesting considering the requirement for CC and subtitles.

HarryD

Andreas Keil is your man for this Nick. [www.spherico.com]

I'm assuming this is a budget thing as it sure would be a lot easier if this 120 hours was brought over to a subtitle service. That or get a bunch of interns and promise them lots of beer.

Michael Horton
-------------------

Hi Nick,

So as I have answered some of your question on standard mail here some of the stuff again - maybe it's interesting for others as well.

So let's start with the end

Quote

one idea i had was to create new media with the subtitles "Burnt in" - a lot easier to cut with.)

Sounds quite tempting and I could modify my tcrPlus filter for that, but there are some problems.
Quite often a subtitle overlaps a cut or a scene does have several subtitles like with an interview and that can't be handled by a filter plugin in an easy way.

The thing you mentioned in your email

Quote

but i feel the ideal way would be to somehow use markers in FCP

is the better way to go. Markers will travel with your cut and can be retrieved later from the clip in relation to the sequence by using XML.
These results can be converted to a format which looks like a transcript. The drawback is that marker handling is not that elegant in FCP.
But anyway, from there you have something you can use with with either Belle Nuit or my TitleExchange.
Belle Nuit offers a lot of options to setup a subtitle and an easy way to integrate those titles into most of the current NLEs using EDLs (I'm always impressed about what Matthias is creating there and how much he knows about all of the NLEs and DVD authoring systems).
My TitleExchange does have another approach. It doesn't allow to create subtitles based upon a given movie. It allows to import some given transcripts or other file like FCP XMLs or Apples STLs and others and then create new text based subtitles for the given output.
Both apps do have advantages and disadvantages. With Belle Nuit you probably will have a better formatting for the subtitles as it uses high quality rendered files, with TEP you have the option to edit the subtitle text and timing within FCP and easily send that to an Apple STL for DVDSP (but with less font options compared to Belle Nuit) or other formats.

One thing is that the rendered files from Belle Nuit are high quality final files which have to be re-rendered when text is changing, the files have to be re-connected as well.

Another thing I did mention on this list several times is to use layered TIFFs, these files can be opened by PhotoShop in the same way as original PSDs but they behave in FCP like normal flattened TIFFs (in DVDSP as well). These files do keep the text as editable text and all the effects as editable effects - so changing any attributes of a subtitle is even easier than with Boris or other generators.
Both my app and Belle Nuit can't create layered TIFFs right now. But for owners of TEP I do offer an AppleScript (using PhotoShop AppleScript - and some advice how to handle) to transfer text to a layered TIFFs.

Hope this helps
Andreas

Quote
Andreas
Quote:
one idea i had was to create new media with the subtitles "Burnt in" - a lot easier to cut with.
Sounds quite tempting and I could modify my tcrPlus filter for that, but there are some problems.
Quite often a subtitle overlaps a cut or a scene does have several subtitles like with an interview and that can't be handled by a filter plugin in an easy way.

well yes, and no...
i've got 2 ideas about this:
one is that i can export from a timeline with overlaid titles,
then bring it back in, and correct the TC &Reel#

another would use the FCP feature of being able to apply a filter to just a SPECIFIED AREA OF A CLIP.
if you mark a section of a clip with in/outs, and select that area (Option A)
you can then apply a filter to JUST THAT AREA.
you can even open the clip into the viewer, and adjust the filter's in/outs in the filters tab.

then a simple export will give you the titles burnt in.

it's probably a little harder to add the titles this way, but i could create a QuicKeys macro for it pretty quickly, i think
and i'd also need something that doesn't exist yet:
a text tool that is a FILTER that sits inside the clip, not a GENERATOR that sits on top of it.

the benefit of the burnt in titles is you can load the clip in the viewer.
i wish FCP had a way of displaying the marker info WHILE THE CLIP WAS PLAYNG.
that would be cool.
actually, this is how BelleNuit works

the downside of burnt in titles is that you'd most likely have to re-build for the final version,
and what do you do about overlaid images??

Quote
Adreas
Belle Nuit offers a lot of options to setup a subtitle

yes, BelleNuit is the winner in the text formatting stakes as far as i can see.
it's great the way you can change your mind about the style, and it affects all titles.
and i like the way it guides you to an optimum duration
(for those who haven't seen this, it gives you warning flags: red for too short, blue for too long, green for just right)

important things for subtitle text:

Border control
Box control
Drop-Shadow control (in FCP this is handled by the motion settings, but maybe should be included)
Wrapping control
and as you know, ability to Justify the lines to the bottom line.

Quote
Andreas
Belle Nuit are high quality final files which have to be re-rendered when text is changing, the files have to be re-connected as well.

yes, a simple change is not so simple in BelleNuit.
and your Apple script sounds interesting.

=============

the ultimate luxury FCP option would be to have subtitles triggered from markers.
a new breed of "Subtitle markers"
they can operate either from within a clip, or from the timeline
they display as overlays, like BellNuit, and can be automatically timed, like Andreas's TEP.
at some point you can "press a button" and have them all turn into hard, but editable text generators or files, with a style that can change universally.

=============



nick

Quote
Nick
?with a style that can change universally.

You can do this with the XML generated by TEP, since there is only one master generator.
If you see that the imported XML doesn't match your expectations, you can open the XML in TextEditor and modify the master generator and all of the generators will have the same style.

You can also use Christoph's CHV Credit's plugin (and disable the scroll), it gives you 7 different styles in one generator so it's quite easy to have parts of the subtitles marked as lyrics or something like that.

I personally prefer the 'marker setup' for subtitles even though they are not visible during playback.
As mentioned I did several multi-language movies where people did for example spoke german, english and hungarian. We needed german, english, hungarian, romanian and french subtitles. The cutter did set a marker always where speech did start and named it "g", "e", "h". Then we used a tool similar to my readXML to (re)number the markers in the project and read out all those marker timings. The times were aditionally converted to QT chapter tracks for different languages which where assigned to an export of the current timeline (just a row of scenes). These movies where sent to the translator(s). The chapters allowed to jump to a part of the movie and just listen and translate.
The advantage was that the editor and director had the freedom to do what they thought will be best for the movie without spending any time or thoughts on subtitles as this stuff was done in the "background".
The translator(s) sent back a text file where each marker had his translation. As everything was numbered it was easy to use some XML tool to assign the translation to the marker comments in the project - still not using subtitles, but using the marker information/translation as an additional help. When the final cut was done we used XML and TEP to create the first subtitle version for each language (using generators). This stuff had to be fine tuned.

After "tuning" the generators were moved/copied to the language tracks. So the german version had the subtitles for english and hungarian, the english version had german and hungarian and so on.

As these title tracks still had "only FCP generator" quality we used TEP to create a simple Apple STL from each track. (We also used TitleCleaner for spell checking)
From there we used an AppleScript and PhotoShop's Scripting to create high quality layered TIFFs (for both FCP and DVDSP) and converted the STL to an EDL to re-connect in FCP.

Even though this all sounds complicated it had been a very smooth workflow for all of us as it allowed to find each subtitle easily both in FCP and the translations. Also the use of Smile for QT helped a lot with international communication.

Hope this helps for the workflow.

Andreas