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FCP and subtitling
Hey guys
I’m about to embark in a long subtitling mission, and would love to hear your thoughts on the best way to do this in FCP. The subtitles are to be (initially) hard-coded into the movie, so there’s no need for now to think about exporting them to DVD studio or anything like that.
My questions are:
– What is the best effect tool to do this? Im using Spherico Text up, but its kind of shitty.
– If, after doing many clips worht of text I decide to change fonts, is there a quick way to do this?
– Perhaps it can be done by exporting an XML and then editing that XML (say in BBedit)?
– Or am I stupid and there’s a much better tool to do this? Outside of FCP…
Thanks a lot for your advice,
Federico
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5 Replies
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[Federico Urdaneta] “- What is the best effect tool to do this? Im using Spherico Text up, but its kind of a mess. “
NIce. I use Sperico to take the text we have in the show and put it onto a database so that we can check for spelling errors. We go from FCP to the document. Haven’t done the other way around with this app. What we do is either type as we go, or have a transcriber type onto a Word doc, and then copy and paste. Tedious? Time Consuming? Yes. Editing is that…always has been that. If you thought differently, then you are in the wrong field.
[Federico Urdaneta] “- If, after doing many clips worht of text I decide to change fonts, is there a quick way to do this? “
Nope…gotta change them one at a time. Yeah, I wish there was a PASTE ATTRIBUTES: FONTS too. Been there…
[Federico Urdaneta] “- Perhaps it can be done by exporting an XML and then editing that XML (say in BBedit)? “
Got me there. dunno.
[Federico Urdaneta] “- Or am I stupid and there’s a much better tool to do this? Outside of FCP… “
Why not use the word doc and time code? Cut and paste? It would be cool to have something like MacCaption that worked with subtitles, and not just captions. That is slick. But it is also $8000…
Shane
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Checkout Automatic Sync Technologies. They will transcribe and provide timed caption files in a variety of formats for around $200 per program hour. We just used them to make subtitles for a series of Flash movies for eBay. The Flash swf hooks up with an xml containing the captions and timing data which is one of the formats they provide. I haven’t used it for video captions, but it’s one of the formats they offer. With that kind of pricing for a 3-day turnaround, I’m sure I couldn’t do it myself less expensively.
John
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thanks a lot for the replies. i guess there’s just no easy way out here. just a lot of elbow grease and keep the viewer in OPEN sync. i sure hope the famous upcoming final cut revision will address some of these issues.
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Hi,
I believe there is a better way and it is called Annotation edit.
Not only can you screen a qt copy of your program and do your spotting right there, but you can import and export just about any titling format, import excel spreadsheets, AND, if you change your mind about the font, re export the whole subtitling file with new font in less than 10 seconds.
The exported file is XML and you import it as xml into fcp and insert it on the topmost track, et voilà.
Of course you’ll have to spend some time and efforts learning the software…
Patrice
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I’m just now trying out Annotation Edit and must say I’m quite impressed. So far it seems to work very well and integrates with FCP (via XML) quite nicely. No complaints so far…
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