Editing subtitles?

[GelflingHand]

I'm about to embark on editing the subtitles for my fan edit, and any advice would be welcome.

For a start, what's the best subtitle file format to use? I'd like to be able to specify position, size, color, and ideally font, not just the text, while being compatible with as many players as possible.

Is there any way to rip subs from DVD into an editable format while preserving position, size, and color? How about from blu-ray (not my first choice, but better than nothing)?

And what's the best software for editing existing subtitles, for Linux or Windows? With features like moving a chunk of subtitles in a block, rather than having to adjust each line individually. And if possible, multiple channels so blocks of subtitles can be temporarily overlapped without getting mixed together.

How should forced subtitles be handled (eg for onscreen foreign text that needs translation irrespective of which soundtrack you're listening to)? Should there just be two separate subtitle tracks, or is there a way to flag some lines as forced? Can a specific subtitle track be set as active by default in an mkv file?

 

[lapis molari]

Look up the difference between PGS, SRT, VOBSUB formats for subtitle files. SRT is the easiest to edit but offers no unique placement or color.

Forced subs can be burnt in when you render your edit (they're no longer a separate file and become part of the video image). That way you can have subtitles for foreign text be always on, while the regular English subs can be turned on of off by the viewer. For the duration that the forced subs are on-screen, you leave the subtitle file empty. Otherwise you'd get two sets of subs over each other.

You can't burn-in different languages in the same spot though. E.g. you have 2 audio tracks, English and Spanish, and 2 subtitle tracks, English and Spanish, with bits of dialog in German. If you burn in the English translation for the German dialog, then that's what'll show irrespective of which audio track is selected. Too bad for the Spanish viewers.
In that example, I recommend that you make 4 sets of subtitles: English (entire movie), English (foreign languages only), Spanish (entire movie), Spanish (foreign languages only). Nothing burnt-in (all soft-coded, nothing hard-coded), and clearly list them in the description of your edit.

I use SubtitleEdit for extracting any format, editing, and saving in SRT. Editing in blocks is no problem. Having subs overlap is also no problem, just give two blocks of subs the same time code (I don't know why you'd want that, but that doesn't matter: it works.)

 

[theprion]

For a start, what's the best subtitle file format to use? I'd like to be able to specify position, size, color, and ideally font, not just the text, while being compatible with as many players as possible.

SRT (SubRipText) is the standard. It's a text file, so it can be edited with as much as a notepad. For styling however, you're looking into ASS (AlphaSubStation), which is pretty widespread and overall compatible. You can easily turn an SRT into an ASS with any of the software options.

And what's the best software for editing existing subtitles, for Linux or Windows? With features like moving a chunk of subtitles in a block, rather than having to adjust each line individually. And if possible, multiple channels so blocks of subtitles can be temporarily overlapped without getting mixed together.

+1 for SubtitleEdit. You can easily move chunks of lines forward or backward together. I guess what you call "Multiple channels" is something like what you'd see in a video editing suite, but all you have available for you in an editor like SE is the video stream and the audio wavelength. As for styling, after I'm done with SRT editing in SE I like to use AegisSub (but it's outdated and there might be better options). Any changes you make to the file there will already output it as ASS by default.

Is there any way to rip subs from DVD into an editable format while preserving position, size, and color? How about from blu-ray (not my first choice, but better than nothing)?

Not that I'm aware of. They are usually image files (PGS, VOBSUB) and would have to be OCR'd to become text files to be edited. Most subrips are done that way but it requires some HEAVY revising to round the rough edges.

How should forced subtitles be handled (eg for onscreen foreign text that needs translation irrespective of which soundtrack you're listening to)? Should there just be two separate subtitle tracks, or is there a way to flag some lines as forced? Can a specific subtitle track be set as active by default in an mkv file?

You should keep them as two separate subtitle tracks, like the discs do. It's very straightforward to do it and tag them likewise (forced, default) using MKVToolNix.

 

[GelflingHand]

I use SubtitleEdit for extracting any format, editing, and saving in SRT. Editing in blocks is no problem. Having subs overlap is also no problem, just give two blocks of subs the same time code (I don't know why you'd want that, but that doesn't matter: it works.)

What I mean is if I've swapped two scenes, and I select the subtitles for one scene and move them to their new position, they'd be mixed in with the subtitles for the second scene. I'd then need to select the subtitles for the second scene to move them to where they're supposed to be in my edit, without moving any of the scene one subtitles back. I suppose I could temporarily move the scene 1 subs to the end of the movie, then move the scene 2 subs to where scene 1 was, then move the scene 1 subs to where they're supposed to be? A bit awkward, but I guess fan editing isn't typical usage for subtitle software.

 

[lapis molari]

What I mean is if I've swapped two scenes [...] I suppose I could temporarily move the scene 1 subs to the end of the movie

Aha, I understand. No worries: in SubtitleEdit the lines of text have a time stamp AND a sequence number. When you change the time because you shift a scene, the sequence number does NOT automatically change with it. So that number will show which lines belong with Scene1 vs Scene2. When it comes time to select the block from Scene1, you can select "View by number" instead of "View by start time". Then the two scenes won't be mixed up so you can easily select Scene1 to move it when you want.

 

[GelflingHand]

Thanks to you both - SubtitleEdit is working out nicely. It has decent support for ASS formatting built in, so need to switch to AegisSub. And the DVD import (using the Tesseract 5 OCR option) was almost flawless!