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Subtitle Project Advice?
Hi everyone –
I have a project coming up and am feeling a little overwhelmed as I search for the best way to do it and have no one “in real life” to ask questions of. So here’s the project and if anyone can give me “here’s what I’d do” advice or point me in a direction, that would really help. Thank you in advance all of you wise and experienced people. 🙂
The company I work for develops training videos for other companies, lots of short (2 – 5 minutes) videos that get branded and sent to clients for them to use however they want. There’s been a growing need for a lot of the larger, more global companies to have SUBTITLED versions of these videos.
When we were working in FCP7, we used this awesome website called Sayqua.com to create xml files of the formatted subtitles that we could just import into FCP, which would then automatically create a sequence with the subtitles formatted and timed. It allowed us to subtitle and export hundreds of videos in a rather short period of time.
We need to do the same thing and we need to be able to do it without relying on FCP (since we sometimes outsource to contractors for big projects, and a lot of people don’t have FCP but do have Premiere). We use Adobe Premiere as well so I’d like to be flexible in our production process, compatible with whichever software we need to use.
So far, all my research has yielded very complex processes for doing subtitles in Premiere. A coworker is looking into using Camtasia, which I know nothing about but am looking into as well.
So I’m asking your advice. For doing hundreds of short videos in multiple languages relatively quickly, what is the best way to go about doing this without losing our minds? 🙂
Thank you!!
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1 Reply
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There’s no automated way in Premiere Pro to add subtitles, unless they’ve slipped one in in recent updates and haven’t publicized it well.
However, in After Effects there is – well, close.
After you have transcribed your audio, use a program like Subtitle Workshop, Subtitle Edit or Jubler to develop a subtitle file(SRT). There are many such programs out there, but I like Subtitle Workshop, plus it’s free.
Then use this most excellent After Effects plugin – ‘pt_ImportSubtitles’, which can be found easily by Googling. It’s only $25. ‘pt_ImportSubtitles’ will directly import the SRT file created by Subtitle Workshop, instantly giving you a timeline of the subtitles to then place directly over your video, either by rendering a separate video file, or via Dynamic Linking. In a couple of mouse clicks you can build all of your subtitles. Plus, it you need to edit them later, simply re-import the SRT file into the ‘pt_ImportSubtitles’ again, and they’ll all be rebuilt complete with the changes. The visual format(font, color, position, etc.) of the subtitles is set up in the ‘pt_ImportSubtitles’ plugin.
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