Premiere Pro CS6 – Subtitling

[Steve Brame]

Here’s a thread that recently discussed this.

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/3/947241

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia Quadro 4000 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID0 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * Creative Cloud
——————————————-
“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Jona Taylor]

Hi Steve! Thank you for the response.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I’m on a Mac. I’ve scoured over everything I can find on Creative Cow and elsewhere and there seems very little that will help make this process less cumbersome.

I just started creating ‘titles’ and hour ago. If I go hard I should be done in a month.

My fear is that if after creating thousands of titles that sit over the video timeline, I’ll want to or have to make changes to the font settings (and since there are no batch functions) it will mean making the changes one by one. I sure hope I have made the right choice in selecting the font attributes. Incredible that this could be left out of the functionality. I did put in a feature request today.

I’d be grateful if anyone might have a better approach to what is an enormous undertaking I’ve just started!

Best regards,
Jona
2013 Macbook Pro
Premiere Pro 6.0.2

[Steve Brame]

[Jona Taylor] ” I’ll want to or have to make changes to the font settings (and since there are no batch functions) it will mean making the changes one by one.”

Not if you use the ‘pt_ImportSubtitles’ script solution. Simply open the After Effects project back up, change the text characteristics in the plugin, and re-export. Text properties are changed on every single subtitle. You could literally have thousands of subtitles already laid out, and change their font with a few mouse clicks.

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia Quadro 4000 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID0 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * Creative Cloud
——————————————-
“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Jona Taylor]

Big thanks for your continued help here Steve 🙂

“… Not if you use the ‘pt_ImportSubtitles’ script solution. Simply open the After Effects project back up…”

Ok so, if I understand you correctly, are you saying that I can continue creating text files over top of my footage (man speaking Hindi) and then when I’m finished the film, I could open the project up in AE and by using the ‘pt_ImportSubtitles’ script solution plugin I would be able to make changes to the font or maybe even the language without having to scroll through the Premiere Pro timeline and modifying each text file? Correct?

See the thing is that I’m still very much in the rough edit and am adding subtitles to the footage so that I understand what the subject is saying. As I am building the film in Premiere Pro I want to see everything in front of me on the timeline as it is happening so that I know that it is happening correctly and everything is lined up. As I don’t have much experience with AE and ‘pt_ImportSubtitles’ script solution I have no idea at this point how or if I need to implement these tool at this early stage of the edit. Know what I mean? But if AE and ‘pt_ImportSubtitles’ script solution can be used to batch modify subtitles later down the road then this may come in handy.

The truth is that this is the first time I am in this process with Premiere Pro so have no idea if I’m going about this subtitling in the right way. I just know that when I watch/ hear the subject speaking in the program monitor I want to be able to read what he is saying so that I’ll know if I want to select that footage for use in the film.

Any tips or tricks before I get too deep into this would sure be welcomed now. I just finished the first 5 minutes and it took 1.5 hours. There are 10 hours still left to go. I won’t subtitle every single thing but at least half of it and then take just the best stuff in the end.

Again Steve, I would very much appreciate anything you or anyone could add at this early stage in this huge process 🙂

Theatrical Release
Font:
Bold Helvetica: 48
Y Position: 1000
Inner Stroke: 5
Outer Stroke: 10

Jona
2013Macbook Pro
CS6 (Premiere Pro 6.0.2)

[Steve Brame]

Adding individual subtitles in PPro is certainly one method, however, it’s the difficult one – especially if future editing is needed.

If you have even a basic grasp of AE, you should easily be able to use ‘pt_importsubtitles’. The very minimal time you would spend learning the script’s use would be far less than hand editing each individual subtitle.

With ‘pt_importsubtitles’ you can import subtitles into After Effects using either the Encore Text Script or SubRip file format. These can easily be created with many subtitle editors, a very popular Mac editor is the free ‘Subs Factory’. These subtitle formats are simply text files with each line of subtitle text and the in/out timecodes where they are supposed to appear/disappear in your film/video. If you need to create an alternate language version, you would change the subtitles in the editor, then export a new SubRip format file to use with ‘pt_importsubtitles’.

Please look at the script’s demo video and read about it’s usage. You can find them here…

https://aescripts.com/pt_importsubtitles/

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia Quadro 4000 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID0 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * Creative Cloud
——————————————-
“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Jona Taylor]

Thank you Steve!

I’ve just downloaded Subsfactory and am just having a go at it to see what the process is.

So far I can not find a way to see the text over the video. Is this possible? I believe it would be best to see the font so as to know how much of the subjects sentence (text) fits on the screen and if I have to condense the subjects text so that it will fit into the title safe area correctly. I often find that I have to tweak the text a little so that it will fit. The challenge is here is to do it so that it remains true to their words and the meaning that they are trying to convey.

And also, I can imagine that each time I make a change to the text in the editor over the coming months I would generate a new subrip file and then plug it back into Premiere Pro. Correct?

Big thanks for your continued support. Your last post moved the ball up the field a decent distance.
Jona

[Trevor Ward]

Jona, did you ever figure something out?

I’ve got this same situation. I have an hour long interview and a transcript. It’s not formatted for subtitling as it’s only a rough approximation of the time. I need to be able to see all the clips in the timeline and the text. As I edit my rough draft, I need to constantly see what’s being said in each clip. Would be a nightmare to have to create a hundred “items” in PP. FCP made this MUCH easier.

-Trevor F. Ward
Red Eye Film Co.
http://www.redeyefilmco.com
http://www.MemoriesofGuantanamo.com

[Steve Brame]

This subtitle editor looks pretty good, though I’ve never used it.

Aegisub

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia Quadro 4000 * Windows 7 Premium 64bit * System Drive – WD Caviar Black 500GB * 2nd Drive(Pagefile, Previews) – WD Velociraptor 10K drive 600GB * Media Drive – 2TB RAID0 (4 – WD Caviar Black 500GB drive) * Matrox MX02 Mini * Adobe CC
——————————————-
“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Jona Taylor]

Hi Trevor,
Sorry, I never found a solution other to create thousands of items… which I’m still doing.
I’m still working in CS6 so I don’t know if things are better in CC. Yes FCP was much easier in this dept.
If you do find a decent method I would be grateful to hear of it.
Best,
Jona

[Tom Hughes]

Hi Jona,
I have had a few subtitling projects, most in English, but also in Arabic, Portuguese, Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese and Turkish. My workflow is as follows:

Applications used: Premiere Pro CS6-CC 2014, Aegisub, Jubler, After Effects CS6-CC

Edit in Premiere

Transcription from final edit (.txt)
Translation (external service) – this is formatted to keep lines at the maximum length, set by styling, and splitting them sensitively (.txt)

This text file is then imported into Aegisub for timing along to final edit (external service if in another language) (Aegisub provides timecode in 1/100 second increments rather than frames which the script below needs to finction correctly)
Saved as .ass file
Opened in Jubler and saved as .ssa file

Open After Effects with your edit in the timeline
Style a text layer the way you want subtitles to look
With your text layer selected, use pt_SSAKaraokeAnimator script to load the .ssa file saved from Jubler
This creates a text layer with all subtitle changes marked as ‘Source Text’ hold keyframes, allowing for easy adjustment

I could place this as a dynamic comp in Premiere and edit both back and forth, but I always leave subtitling to the end.

For Arabic, I had to use the ArabicText script to correctly reverse the characters.
For Hindi, I had to take care with my unicode characters as some were displaying oddly on my English language system. As far as I know, Adobe products cannot handle Hindi characters dependably. I actually had to use Submerge to hardcode my subtitles as it handled Hindi fine.

This worked very well for me, but for you, a similar approach to what the pt_SSAKaraokeAnimator script takes may work well.

If you link an After Effects comp to Premiere, you could set up a text layer and keyframe ‘Source Text’ and change the text as you go along the edit. It seems to fit with your linear style of working, though trying to edit in a different language to your own must be very difficult!

Premiere Pro CC has a closed captioning feature which has very limited styling options. Not really for subtitling, although may be useful for your editing.

It seems there isn’t a simple solution inside Premiere, although in tandem with After Effects you’ve many more options.