Subtitles in DVD Studio or Final Cut?

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Both tways are painful, but DVD Studio Pro is the way to go if you want what people expects in a DVD – the ability to turn them on or off, and eventually have more than one subtitle language. DVD Studio Pro allows you to create subtitles in a timeline, but it’s still painful (incredibly it doesn’t allow you to move several subtitle clips at the same time). In my opinion, the best way is to prepare the subtitle in STL format (a text file with timecode for each subtitle entry, and special commands for fonts, font size, color, paragraph formatting, line breaks, etc.) It’s almost impossible not to commit mistakes while typing those, but you can fix them in the text file and re-import them, rather than trying to fix your mistakes in DVD SP’s timeline. The DVD SP manual explains the whole STL process. Creating subtitles must be the most awful thing in DVD authoring. It’s easy but really tedious and full of unfogiving little mistakes 😉
On the other hand, I have a vague idea of reading in Apple’s site that someone created a script that automates creation of subtitles from text files into FCP’s timeline, with text generators. I have no idea if that script is available from the author. And as I said, you can’t turn them off or on, which is the way a DVD works.

Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo@adolforozenfeld.com

[Parker Gowan]

That’s pretty much what I figured, but thanks for the information. Actually it turns out our client is looking for closed captions on the DVDs, I haven’t done the leg work myself to see what that entails, but from briefly scanning the DVDSP manual, I need to do something similar to what you talking about with subtitles and the stl files.

Thanks a lot for the response.

Parker