General discussion about increasing the prevalence of SUBTITLES / CAPTIONS in fanedits

[Phase3]

On my edits, I have genuinely forgotten to add them in until it was too late, and far too much work to add them in after an edit has been completed...
I use Premiere; one thing that I need to look into is can the system automatically move down the captions in conjunction with a cut / trim / ripple delete. I suspect that it can, however I haven't looked into it yet.

Synchronization > Adust all times (show earlier/later)...

From there you can move every line, selected lines, or the selected line onwards.

So whenever you change a subtitle, while it's highlighted you click "start set and offset rest". Every subtitle after that point will move with that subtitle. So once you've done that, every subtitle will be in time until the next point at which you've made a cut.

I might have to do a short tutorial or something as this keeps coming up and I wonder if people think subtitle creation is much more work than it needs to be. You absolutely do not have to create and/or edit every individual sub. The amount of work depends on the number of cuts in your edit, but you can even playback the edit at 2x speed while you're working and just skip ahead to each time there's a piece of dialogue.

Thank you both so much for that information! I have tried SE, with great success in one edit, but not so great in another -- the tips you noted are exactly what I was missing!

 

[unfair]

one thing that I need to look into is can the system automatically move down the captions in conjunction with a cut / trim / ripple delete. I suspect that it can, however I haven't looked into it yet.

It does, with the same caveats as any other track - for instance it is possible to throw video and audio out of sync with a careless ripple delete depending on track overlap if they aren't linked, I would imagine the same is possible but less likely with subs since they're typically shorter. You also have to remember when you're ripple deleting video to select the associated subs in the same delete.

And final caveat, when you're inserting new footage you should use hotkey B to stretch existing footage, trim a gap, fill it with your new footage, and then ripple delete to close any gaps. It sounds clunky but imo it's much safer alignment wise than trying to select and drag everything to a different spot to make space, and risk missing items in your selection. Of course the same alignment edge case mentioned above for ripple deletes also applies to overlapping clips when you're stretching footage.

 

[Phase3]

Mate that is fantastic information -- thank you so much!

You also have to remember when you're ripple deleting video to select the associated subs in the same delete.

This is precisely what I was going to look into -- thanks for that information!

And final caveat, when you're inserting new footage you should use hotkey B to stretch existing footage, trim a gap, fill it with your new footage, and then ripple delete to close any gaps. It sounds clunky but imo it's much safer alignment wise than trying to select and drag everything to a different spot to make space, and risk missing items in your selection. Of course the same alignment edge case mentioned above for ripple deletes also applies to overlapping clips when you're stretching footage.

I haven't used many hotkeys at all -- what I was using to insert new footage, and move the rest of the audio & video down the timeline was the 'comma' key.

 

[General Irohnic]

I'm pretty obsessive when it comes to subs. I trust my ears and my peers over any AI, so I'm doing all the subtitles for my Middle-earth edit manually, using tons of online resources, the original subs as reference, the isolated center audio track, going to the books for certain things, and some intuition and guesswork. For Middle-earth specifically, I really wanted to subtitle and translate most, if not all of the dialogue spoken in the other languages, and Subtitle Edit does the trick with its alignment features (though it is a daunting task, me not being a Tolkien scholar or linguist in any way).

https://imgur.com/a/zLGGnHB

I will say, I shot myself in the foot a bit with my choice of edit. The Middle-earth project being 19 and a half hours long, the waveform in Subtitle Edit ends at about 12:25:40 (which I've now reached. For reference, it's the scene in The Two Towers where Merry and Pippin get almost eaten by the tree fighting over the water). The dev does know about it, so I'm hoping the next version will fix it and soon, because using the manual controls rather than the timeline is going to be rough, and I do actually want to release this edit, you know.

 

[asterixsmeagol]

Getting real subtitles is obviously better than AI, but I just used WhisperAI to generate some subtitles for videos that didn't have any. Using the Tiny and Small language models have given me bad results, Medium is OK, and Large is pretty good. Not perfect, but good enough to get the idea. Much better than just watching a video in a laguage I don't speak and trying to get it all from context!