Has anyone tried DH Subtitle?

[David Roth weiss]

I’ve never used it, but everything that Martin and Digital Heaven do is always really good. And, like everything they offer, there’s a free trial version, so try it out for yourself before buying.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Nick Meyers]

hi, shelby.

DH Subtitle is a text generator plugin.

it’s “thing” is it can be bottom justified,
and also has options to add a transparent box behind the text.
and you can add drop-shodow or outline to the text.

this is all cool, but it’s not really a “system” for subtitling.
i outlined a within-FCP system/process for subtitling in your previous post

i think i also mentioned Text Up Pro.
this, like DH Subtitle, is a text generator plugin for FCP,
but it does MORE.

the main extra advantage of Text Up Pro is it’s auto-wrapping.
you type in a lot of words,
it fits them onto one, or two, or three, or however many lines are needed.

this is very useful.

another useful function it has is that the text can be bottom, top or CENTRE justified.
centre justification comes in very handy for blocks of text that you want to sit in the middle of the screen.

anyway, i think there’s a demo of that too,
so you should try them both out.

cheers,
nick

[Shelby Langley]

Thanks David, Nick!
What I was looking for, good info.

Shelby

[Erik Lindahl]

I’ve used DH Subtitle for a few years now for all our burn-in subtitle work. As stated above it’s not a proper “subtitle tool” where it’s more a “text generator with-in final cut pro” (someone very nifty might be able to suck-out the data in this plugin via an XML export I guess but that’s beyond the normal use of the tool).

WHY USE DH SUBTITLE OVER THE BUILT IN TEXT-TOOLS?

Far more options
– The tool overs proper justifications of text, you can lock it dead center or right / left aligned and it will stay with what ever amount of text you add. You are in control so to speak where as the built-in tools are very “flacky” in this regard

– You also have the option of either a “bounding box” behind the subtitling or a drop shadow. These have limited, but decent fine-tune options.

Speed
– DH Subtitle plays back in realtime all the time even with the drop-shadow effect. The FCP transform affect “drop shadow” is very processor intensive this is not. This includes HD-projects output via a videocard such as the Kona 3.

I can only say good things about DH Sutitle for the price of the product. I do miss an “automatic wrap” feature” and a spell-checker but that’s about it.

Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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[Nick Meyers]

spell check just doesn’t exist in FCP, unfortunately 🙁

Spherico FIlm Tools Title Exchange Pro comes with a spell checker tool.
however i have found spell checking in Word to be a bit faster.

what i did on a recent job was to use Title Exchange Pro to turn my FCP subtitles into a DVD STL file,
and open that in Windows, where i did a quick and easy sell check.

i DID use the Title Exchange Pro spell checker tool to hunt out other forms of errors like double spaces, etc.
cant remember if that was before or after the word routine.

finally, i used Title Exchange Pro to convert the processed STL file back into FCP text

nick

[Erik Lindahl]

The problem is FCP isn’t a native Cocoa-app or it would have access to all the language and text-features of the OS (spelling and grammar check). Not the best tools in the world but a solid bonus and constant across applications that grow with each release of the OS “for free”.

First I do a base setting for the CH Subtitle generator add it to V2, mass-reproduce it in the timeline where it seems I’ll need to make new lines and after that I add the specific text. I just break down my subs in text edit, spell-check and then do a rapid copy & paste. With the Viewer set to “open” it’s quite efficient.

The only huge setback is you can’t copy and paste attributes from the filter so if you realize “oh, I want to decrease the font size to 18 on my web copies and increase to 24 on my DVD copies” you’re in for some manual labor. This is actually something Apple should look into adding to FCP in general, something like After Effects “Adjustment layers” but for generators and effects. Often I’d like to apply for instance a EQ or reverb to an entire track – this would also work for generators… But this is off-topic and dreaming, sorry 🙂

Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
————————

[Nick Meyers]

“The only huge setback is you can’t copy and paste attributes from the filter ”

that’s what TItle Exchange Pro is for!
well another thing, anyway.