[Dmitri Sled]

THIS!

For folks trying to decide on the best workflow approach to subtitling – especially if it’s a big job with hundreds of subs – I would strongly urge you to take up the InDesign route!

Neither Premiere nor AfterEffects are practical for burned-in subtitles. At the very least, if you are considering this option, make sure you have your subtitle font style/size/color/etc locked down and confirmed with everyone and anyone you are working for, because once you settle on it, the ONLY way to change it is by re-opening each individual title. Changing the subtitle style mid-stream will result in hours of repetitive and needless (but hopefully still highly paid) work.

InDesign, on the other hand, is a lot more flexible in this regard. It might sound “counter-intuitive” (or rather, like a cheap-o bandaid/ducttape half-fix) to export hundreds of PNGs and plop them into Premiere, but that seems to be the absolute best way to go about things.

[Dmitri Sled]

HEY ADOBE:

This is one of those infuriating, thoughtless non-decisions that someone made when coding the program and it is sucking the life out of anyone doing repetitive titling.

Please please PLEASE!!! Spend some time with people who do repetitive subtitling to do some usability studies for Titler!! I will give you as much of my own time as you need to fix this.

Because to click the red close window thingie EVERY TIME for THOUSANDS of subtitles is MADDENING.

Who the hell closes work panels with cmd-w anyway?!?!?! Why can’t it just close the Titler window? Who came up with this idiotic decision? (And no, you CANNOT press cmd-w a bunch of times because then when you open titler again, all your tool panels are missing…which you need because of Premiere’s idiotic handling of multiple titles, and your inability to apply the same style to them – and no, “styles” don’t count, because they don’t even copy paragraph alignment – yet another needless keystroke! – not to mention position, etc…in fact, I think it’s a bug, but I have to right click every time I want to apply THE FONT SIZE from a “style” to a new title. And that’s after spending time deleting all their crappy, amateur-looking title presets. WTF Adobe, WTF…)

[Dmitri Sled]

It’s kind of remarkable that the original post is from 2008, and EIGHT YEARS LATER people are still griping about how hard it is to apply the same styling to a bunch of titles at once.

Now, I am the first person to start Adobe-bashing at the slightest pretext, but in this case, I’ll share my workflow for how to make your subtitling task easier if you have a ton of subtitles to plug in. This should be the practice from the outset. If you are like me, though, you may not have this option – you might be picking up in the middle of someone else’s work…

This applies to single-line subtitles, but you can make another template for a double-line subtitle. Make sure to give the double-lined title master some sort of a unique identifying marker – so if you call your regular titles “Title 1”, call the double ones “Title 1d” or “Title 1#” or something…that way you don’t get confused which ones are single-line and which ones are double line, while still preserving sequential order.

1) Create your first master subtitle – align it vertically however you want in the lower third.

2) Center-align the text inside the text box. That way, when you paste new text into a duplicate, it doesn’t get all out of whack horizontally.

3) Now, horizontally align the text using the positioning alignment of the text box itself.

4) At this point, you can safely start duplicating the master title and pasting the new text in there. Notice that you now do not have to re-align anything to anything else. You’ve already done the work in your master title.

5) Now all that’s left for you to do is just copy-paste hundreds of lines of dialogue into hundreds of these duplicates. 🙂

I hope this can save someone a headache or two.