Premiere Pro CS6 – Subtitling

[Jona Taylor]

Hi Tom,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you and I very much appreciate you taking the time to chime in here with your detail and what looks to be a solid approach to the challenges of subtitling. Unfortunately I have just pushed ahead over the months with the painstaking process of creating thousands of subtitles via the titles generator within Premiere. Ugh. I hope your post can help someone further.

Kind regards,
Jona

[Steve Brame]

[Jona Taylor] “creating thousands of subtitles via the titles generator”

For the first time in my life, I feel compelled to type something that I have resisted for years – OMG!

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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Jona Taylor]

Yes Steve, but if you knew what I’ve been through to land this film… some title files are really nothing in comparison. Thanks Adobe.

[Danilo Iglesias]

Hey there,

I work as a subtitler. For Premiere, the best way in my experience is to use Belle Nuit Subtitler to spot and translate your movie and then export an EDL and TIFF files. You then import the EDL into Premiere and link it to the TIFF files. It’s a pain in the rear, bit it’s the only solution I’ve found, until Premiere comes up with an easier way to handle subtitles in their future versions. It’s much easier with FC Pro and Avid.

Good luck,
Danilo at subtitulos.tv

[Steve Brame]

There are MUCH easier ways to incorporate subtitles in Premiere Pro, and they’ve all been discussed here, as well as in a previous thread for which the link has been posted earlier in this thread.

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia GeForce GTX 770 * 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

[Danilo Iglesias]

Try it, it’ll save you time. All other suggestions so far seem to involve more steps and more than 2 different applications. Good luck!

[Steve Brame]

Unfortunately, Belle-Nuit discontinued development of their Windows version of Subtitler way back at Windows XP. It was one of the programs that we investigated back then, but were never able to get it to work well enough for production use, and Belle-Nuit never seemed to be capable of taking care of the problems, or perhaps they simply weren’t interested. Plus, it is rather expensive($200USD) compared to other solutions such as pt_ImportSubtitles($25USD) and EZTitles Plugin for Premiere Pro($50USD rental).

But I’m interested, since I cannot use Bell-Nuit Subtitler(I just tried and it still will not work on Windows) I can’t check this out for myself – after importing the EDL in Premiere Pro, do you have to link each individual TIFF or do you only need to link one of them and Premiere Pro automatically finds the rest?

True, with pt_ImportSubtitles, you need to create your SRT file in a subtitle editor such as Jubler, Subtitle Workshop or even Belle-Nuit Subtitler, but they all pretty much work the same way, and many are free. Then you import that SRT into After Effects, which does add another program to the mix. However, the AE process is only a couple of mouse-clicks, and isn’t a pain at all.

EZTitles Plugin for Premiere Pro is the easiest, however, it’s Windows only and probably not an option for the OP.

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia GeForce GTX 770 * 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

[Danilo Iglesias]

Yes, Belle Nuit discontinued development but the app is still a good choice for subtitlers. Thanks Mathias Buercher for creating it. However, after our exchange yesterday I checked with the guys at ZeitAnker in Berlin and they have a simpler solution: from Annotation Edit, which is like the BMW of subtitling softwares, you can just export an xml and the corresponding images (png) which Premiere will import and link hassle-free. I’ve been using Annotation Edit for a few years and hadn’t noticed that option, doh.

[Steve Brame]

I’d never heard of Annotation Edit. Got very excited when I took a look – the interface looks wonderful – then I noticed that it’s Mac only. However, it’s prompted me to take a look at the other subtitle editors available to see if they too can export a FCP XML with images.

Asus P6X58D Premium * Core i7 950 * 24GB RAM * nVidia GeForce GTX 770 * 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

[Grant Van zutphen]

Hi Jona, here is my workflow for creating subtitles in After Effects and importing into Premiere via dynamic link.
This process is for PC however hopefully a similar approach can be applied for Mac.

You’ll need to use Adobe After Effects & Premiere Pro CS6 (not CC or CS5), the pt_ImportSubtitle script from aescripts, and a subtitle editor (I use Subtitle Edit). You’ll aslo need a transcript of your audio as a UTF-8 plain text (.txt) file or an Adobe Storyline Script (.astx) file.

• Download Subtitle Edit here: https://github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit/releases
Tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZjBLlLPMaU

• Download pt_ImportSubtitles script here: https://aescripts.com/pt_importsubtitles/
Demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axhq0LjT_Eo

• Additional language models for Adobe Speech Analysis can be found here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/kb/installing-additional-speech-libraries.html#cc_cs6

1. Import MP3 or MP4 file with audio into Premiere CS6 (must be MP3 or MP4 format in order to store speech as metadata)
2. Select the MP3/MP4 in the project panel, right click > Analyze Speech (or go to Window > Metadata, and Under Speech Analysis, click Analyse). Ensure MP3/MP4 is writeable (ie. not read-only) to allow metadata to be written to file.
3. Ensure Speech checkbox is checked. Select correct language. Set Quality to High.
4. Add Reference Script (must be either a UTF‐8 Plain Text file (.txt) or an Adobe Story Script (.astx) file.
5. Check ‘Script Text Matches Recorded Dialogue’ checkbox. Hit Ok > Ok.
6. Adobe Media Encoder will launch automatically. When analysis is finished, right click on the output file and select ‘Reveal Output File’.
7. Open Temp folder (C:\Users\*USERNAME*\AppData\Local\Temp).
8. Ensure windows explorer is in ‘details’ view, and sort files by ‘Date modified’.
9. Locate the newest file with suffix ‘_stt.xml’
10. Launch Subtitle Edit and drag in .xml file (must be version 3.3.12 or later containing Flash Cue Point capability).
11. Go to Tools > Merge short lines. Leave ‘Max characters in one paragraph’ at 43, and set ‘Max milliseconds between lines’ to 400. Hit ‘OK’.
12. In List View, select all lines (Ctrl + A) and click ‘Unbreak’.
13. Go to Tools > Fix common errors > Next > Apply selected fixes > OK.
14. Go to Spell Check > Spell Check and make spelling corrections if needed.
15. Ensure video and waveform windows are visible. Go to Video > Show/Hide Video and Video > Show/Hide Waveform. Drag video or audio file into video window.
16. Click in Waveform window to build waveform. Hit play in video window and check timing of subtitles. Drag handles in waveform window to adjust duration of text visibility to match video/audio.
17. At top of the main window in the Format dropdown select SubRip (.srt). For Encoding select Unicode (UTF-8).
18. Save the .srt file in the same location as the video/audio with the same filename.
19. In Premiere, locate the video in the project panel and drag to the ‘New Item’ button create a new sequence.
20. Click the New Item icon again and create a new adjustment layer. Drag adjustment layer from the project panel to the timeline on the uppermost video layer.
21. Extend adjustment layer to the end of video sequence. Right Click > Replace with After Effects Composition (After Effects will launch automatically if the same version is installed as Premiere – ie. Premiere CS6 & AE CS6).
22. In After Effects, go to Window > pt_ImportSubtitles. Set format to SubRip.srt, Text Flow to Center, Vertical Alignment to Bottom.
23. Select the Type tool. Draw a rectangle in the center of the composition high enough for two lines of text, and no wider than the Title Safe area. Ensure paragraph alignment is set to Center Text.
24. With the text frame still active, hit Import Subtitles.
25. Format the text and position as required.
26. With the selection tool, ensure the text box is selected and align to horizontal center of comp (Windows > Align > Align Layers to Composition > Horizontal Center Alignment
27. Save After Effects project. Return to Premiere where After Effects text should now be visible over base video layer via Dynamic Link.
28. If the Premiere edit is still a work-in-progress, locate the sequence in the project panel and drag to the New Item icon. This will nest the text and video layers within a new sequence, which can then be treated as a single clip.
29. If at any time you need to make style changes to the text, do so in After Effects and save to update in Premiere.
30. When edit is complete, export video from Premiere or Adobe Media Encoder.

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