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Subtitle Conundrum
Sorry to bother the grazing in the pasture but I am in dire need of some cows with bigger brains than mine. Please excuse my long post but I want to be as detailed as possible. Also not sure which forum would be better so I posted this in FCP & DVDSP. Sorry for the double post.
We do a monthly dvd for a client that contains about 75 segments and each segment ranges between 2-3 minutes. They are all subtitled in Spanish and English. Now of those 75 maybe 10 are new each month. So every month we just randomly sprinkle the new through out the 2 hour program and rearrange the old to make it look fresh. I make a 2 hour master send it to the caption house and then they send me the .son file of the whole show, I then jump into dvdsp and make a new master with the new subs. Piece of cake.
Well now the client wants to save some $$. No surprise there. They do not not want to pay to re-caption the old segments every month, they just want to pay for the new ones. Makes sense and completely understandable. The question is how do I do that. I have messed around with a couple of options but they all seem labor intensive. See below.
Option 1. I take the captioners .son or .stl files and convert them to XML and import into FCP, match and nest the corresponding titles to their segments. Placing the spanish on one track and the english on another. Then edit them into a new timeline every month and then export the tracks individually as XML’s and take those and convert them back into .stl and reimport into DVDSP. Sounds like a pain in the butt and I am just asking for problems. FYI I tried a test with some of those demo converters(belle-nuit subtitler & title exchange) and the XML would rename all of the subs once I imported them into FCP. Very frustrating and tech support never wrote me back.
Option 2. I export every segment individually and convert to MPEG2 and place each item on it’s own track and have one track jump to the next in DVDSP. Thus avoiding even having to bring the subs into FCP. I just have the captioners make me a file for each one. This should work in theory. But it doesn’t sound very smooth and I am not even sure if the subs would play on all tracks.
Option 3. Just for curiosity sake I had the captioners embed a text track into an uncompressed quicktime of one of the individual segments. I now have 2 uncompressed quicktimes, one with a spanish text overlay and one with english. But I have no idea how to get FCP to read the text track. I exported the text from QT as a TeXML file but I couldn’t get FCP to read it as an XML file. It would not recognize the DTD files I used(I tried three from APPLE’s site). Since I am not that familiar with XML I am sure it was operator error.
Option 4. THE COW PASTURE. Please help me churn out some butter. I bow to thee oh great cow brains. I anxiously await for the best recipe to make some juicy t-bone subs. Sorry I got a little carried away. Thanks for taking the time to read my lengthy post and I hope everyone has a profitable week.
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1 Reply
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hi Jason
my churn is full and my butter usually rancid …
i don’t know much about belle-nuit support, but Andreas Kiel at Spherico (Title Exchange) is usually very responsive and helpful. he often hangs out over at the LAFCPUG forum, so if you need to contact hime with regards to his Title Exchange tool then you might want to try your luck over there.
you could private message him or just post an open question to him directly on the Cafe LA forum. I’ve not known him not answer (unless he didn’t see it of course)
good luck
Andy
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