Editing subtitles along with Video

Hello everyone,

this is my first post, so I'll write down a small introduction for myself (skip to the "So!" if you aren't interested in that).

I've been meaning to get into this hobby (dare I say form of art?) for quite some time, long before knowing that there existed a community such as this dedicated to it.
Up until recently, I had been too busy with other stuff to really give it a shot, but now it seems about time I finally do.

In actuality, I did make a couple of... things that one could loosely consider fanedits, but nothing that could be posted on this site. My first "fanedit" I made by re-chaptering a movie and then programming the DVD player to play only certain chapters and in the order I told it to.
Back then I thought this would be the ideal solution so the movie could be seen both as I wanted and as it originally was, on the same disc (I was inspired by the Alien Quadrilogy)... naturally this was stupid, chiefly because I'd have to insert all dozens of chapters each time and secondarily because the DVD player wasn't as precise as one may wish in its jumps from chapter to chapter.

The second one, was made on VHS. I simply watched a movie taking notes of which scenes I wanted and then recorded it stopping the VCR whenever my notes said so. Yes, yes you may laugh.

So!
A few days ago I decided it was time to get real. I started fooling around with Premiere Pro CS4, learning to use it by trial and error and with surprising speed, I found myself almost on the finishing line with my first real fanedit...
That's when everyone in the house heard me shout a long and colorful line of curses: I was editing a foreign (Japanese) film and in my enthusiasm I completely forgot about the subtitles. Well, maybe not forgot, but for some reason thought "Well, I'll edit them manually once I'm done". It didn't quite occur to me that this long and unrewarding chore could perhaps be managed by the very program I was using.

My question to you, oh Veteran FanEditors, is then: can I "tell" Premiere to manage the subtitles on its own as I edit the audio of a film?
Or if not, is there perhaps another program that would do so? (Like Vegas or Womble?)
This is quite important to me as I'm not a native English speaker, therefore I'd really like to have subtitles in all my future fanedits, if anything for my non-English speaking friends (and you can imagine how much longer it'd take to manually fix them for each project I undertake).

If it is possible, can you tell me how to do so with both srt files and... whatever you get when you tranfer a movie from a DVD to the hard disk.
See, I did that with DVD Shrink (maybe that's the problem right there?) re-authoring so to only have the movie, the audio tracks and subtitle I want (I'm a beginner so I'm not gonna get into menus just yet) and it gave me no srt files. So I wouldn't be sure what to load there for subtitles (let alone how).

Lastly, and on a similar note... I'm European, so generally my DVDs have several dubs in different languages on them. Is it possible to tell Premiere to load more than one up (so I can have English and my own)? I tried loading the VOB files (yes several) that DVD Shrink gave me, but Premiere would only present me with the English dub.

And... that's all which ails me at the time being.
Thank you in advance for any help you may provide guys.

And if anybody's wondering, the Japanese flick isn't something I could submit to this site, but the European DVD is... Robocop 3 (yup, I went... am going there! ;-))

I don't think you can edit subtitle files like a video or audio file. The only way to edit with the movie, to my knowledge is to hard-code the subs in the video file. That usually isn't the most desirable option, but passable sometimes for foreign films

Ah, that is too bad, then I guess "post production" it is.

But even then, I still need to know how to edit subtitles that are not stored as separate srt files. Did I go wrong when tranfering my DVD with DVD Shrink? Playing the VOBs with PowerDVD I find multiple audio streams but no subtitles. Maybe they are in the BUP or IFO files DVDShrink also gave me? (I have no idea what those are)

And what about the issue of managing multiple audio tracks in Premiere?

Anyway, thanks for the insight. At least now I know I did not screw up with that Japanese flick edit

Here is a directory of many subtitle apps: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/subtitle#24

I've used VobSub to extract subtitles from demuxed video files. But I've never worked with subtitles in Premiere.

That should make it faster to edit subtitles after I'm done with the film itself, thanks

Now I just need to figure out how to properly extract/convert/load them as well as additional audio tracks.