Hello,

   I spend hours a day subtitling movies. I've done two so far. There has to be an easier method so I thought I'd ask you!

I use subtitle workshop to make sure that every line is 40 characters long MAX and that every row has a total of 2 lines at the most. Then I switch to Aegisub where I listen to the movie and add time codes to each line. I save it as srt then I open it with notepad. Some of the lines include english writing so I right click and choose insert unicode control character then i choose RLE and the line that had english + arabic words that weren't in order becomes organized and now the line makes sense.

This process takes me 10 hours a day for a 40 minute episode. Actually I just started a couple of weeks ago and this is how much time I spend whenever I want to work on an episode.

Is there an easier method to this? Perhaps ONE application where I can do all this? An application that will allow me to type "hi أنا Omar" exactly the way I wrote it without the need for me to fix it using notepad (unicdoe thingy). The application MAYBE has a way for it to create the time codes automatically for me? :D More importantly, an application that will allow me to include symbols like alpha omega subscript and superscript?

Thank you.

Sounds complicated. I am not sure about the arabic and english lines, but please check out gaupol and subtitle edit from this list. At least they both can handle unicode.

For automatic timings, check Kerensky's SAS (highly experimental!)

I'm looking at Gaupol as we speak but I can't get any videos to load. I checked directories that had mp4 and avi formats but they haven't appeared on the open window yet

Why is that that there aren't any applications that accurately create the time codes for you? Is it that we don't have the right algorithm/technology or that such an app is available but you'd have to pay say 10s of thousands of dollars for it? I mean how is it possible that to this day, we're still forced to spend HOURS on one episode?

And I worked with subtitle edit before. It's like Aegisub; handles unicode but I still need to add the symbols like sub and script later on in the process. I have 20 episodes to work on. the arabic subtitles are ready. I just need to listen to the audio of the episode and use Aegisub to create the timings with just the click of 3 buttons! It's really easy BUT it takes hours. Can you believe it? It takes me hours just to do the timings. and more hours to organize the text so like if the audio says HI IM OMAR but my translation says HI IM OMAR HOW ARE YOU then I need to split the line and ... well u get it -_-

So once again, why is it that there aren't any applications (free and paid) online that automatically create time codes for us? This is a cliche but we got a man on the moon, why can't we do this? :D

Nice rant. There are professional tools that can do all you need, but they are not based on text subtitles, and they only work with hi-tech TV broadcasting equipment.

There are also a few professional subtitle editors. "Spot Subtitle editor" is one of them, and it costs $1000 or more, and Adobe Premiere and Final cut have a few nice features, too (including automatic subtitle creation).

Have you tried Kerensky's SAS from the list? It *tries* to create empty templates with correct time codes.

PS: what you do still sounds unneccessarily complicated to me, but then I am not quite aware of what it is you're doing. :-)

Lovely. I'll have to check them all! Yes I did try SAS and the timings weren't so good. All in all, I'll still end up having to check each line so I might as well do it myself :D

As for the TV station software, I recall reading about it in another post you took part in.

As for what is it that I'm doing:

I have an episode in english. Someone transcribes the episode but in arabic. Then it's my job to take that transcript and turn it to subtitles

1- copy the content of the arabic transcript word document into a notepad document

2- save the notepad document using ansi (sw doesnt support unicode) encoding set.

3- open the notepad file with sw

4- set the max length to 40 (for example)

5- select all the lines (ctrl+a)

6- press ctrl+shift+L to apply the max char length policy on all these lines

7- save the file as ass

8- open it with aegisub

9- load the audio file

10- start listening to the audio and add the timings. if a row contains more than two lines i'll have to decide when to split up the lines. even if the row contains only two lines, i might still end up splitting it up in order to follow the speaker's speed. so if he pauses and in the middle of the two lines for say 4 seconds, it makes sense that i need to split them lines at the point of pausing.

11- this episode might contain symbols so when i saved it as ansi earlier, all the symbols were gone (at least hte symbols that notepad lets me view like a power sign and a degree sign) so while watching hte video, i take note of the rows that require the inclusion of such symbols.

12- once im done with the timings, i save the file as srt (i like it more than ass because it's clear)

13- i open the srt file with notepad, right click and choose SHOW UNICODE CONTROL CHARS then i attend to each row i noted down in the previos steps and i try to add the symbol OR fix the line itself. And depending on the nature of the video, sometimes i have to fix a ton of lines because they have both english and arabic. the fixing is easy. just right click at the end of the line, choose insert unicode control char, and choose rle. the order of the words is fixed automatically. but that consumes time even if i knew which row i should go to.

if you think this shouldn't take more than 10 hours please tell me how i can utilize my resources more efficiently :D

I downloaded spot subtitle but their file is damaged. I downloaded it 4 times on different PCs and everytime the app launches it crashes! They said they'll look into it -_- And I don't have a 64 bit OS so I'm stuck  doing nothing. By the way, spot light costs at around 1500 EUROS. You sure you gave me the right name? Myab e it was another application?

Very inefficient and twice the work. If the translator would take an english (or any other) subtitle as a template and go from there, almost all the work would be done.

Spot: yeah, that's the one. I wasn't sure how much it costs, so I wrote $1000 or more. $1000 vs €1500 - does it matter? It's both too expensive for homemade subs.

could you please explain? in deadly details!!!! What should I do and how? I didn't get the template part. So can u write me a quick guide? :D I completed 3 and I got another 6 to go and I don't want to go through this again. So please, if you could spare like 5 min online to show me what you're talking about id appreciate it a lot.

spotlight crashes and i havent gotten it to work yet. im in the process of arranging a mac system to be delivered so that i can test premiere and final cut pro.

but until then, again, PLZ show me how is it that i can do this quickly!

I meant that your translator should use a subtitle editor like SW in the first place. It doesn't make much sense if one person translates and the other does the timings. But it seems it's to late for that now, right?

Just FYI, the normal procedure for making a subtitle from scratch is this: you load the film into SW, then you watch it, and each time someone says something, you press the key shortcuts for new line, enter what is said (or you translate it right away), then you use the coimmands to adjust the time period (how long the line appears on screen) and shift it around so it starts at the right time, then you continue to the next line. After a while, you'll get pretty skilled and it's getting quicker and quicker. After you're finished, you polish it up a little, adjust characters per line, overlapping and spelling. Done. That's how I would do it anyway.

It's much easier if you already have a subtitle in any other language. You load it into SW, load the video and activate Translator Mode. Now you watch the film and write down what is being said. The cool thing is that you take the timings for each line from the other subtitle! You just have to fill in the text, and that is what most translators do: they take the english subtitles and use it as a TEMPLATE for their translation.

I am sorry, but I don't have a manual or howto for your situation. All I know is that your miracle tool or setting doesn't exist AFAIK. It IS HARD work to make subtitles, and in your constellation it's extra-hard.

PS: Those were your 5 minutes, now I need to go back to work. Good luck.

I just gave you one more minute. I just remembered that it is possible to import plain text files into SW.

Each line of text will create one subtitle line, so you "only" have to take care of the timings.

I believe it's possible to take the timings form another subtitle...eh..provided the lines "say" the same and the number of lines is identical. Don't ask me how it's done, I don't have it installed and now you got a lot more than 1 more minute. You'll figure it out, I'm sure.

Hello and thank you for your generous extra minute :D

This is my reply to your first post:

Regarding the Just FYI paragraph, this is exactly what I'm doing only the first thing I do is adjust the max length per line, divide the rows in case they contain more than two lines and fix the punctuation since i'm using arabic. THEN i go to aegisub and it's there that i add the timings. You need to try it. FASTER than SW when it comes to adding timings and more accurate since i actually see the wave form whereas in SW, it'll depend on your reflexes especially if one line is made up of one word so you have to be fast.. You see a wave form so you no exactly where a sentence starts and ends.

As for the paragraph about reading from file, I'm aware of the function. I did try it before but i recall there was a condition about the number of lines matiching the number of lines in the current file.

As for the paragraph about the manual, sorry it's my fault. When you mentioned template and translator, I wasn't sure if you mean an actual translator or some function that's part of SW.

Finally, why is it extra hard with me? It takes me 1.5 hours to set the timings for some 8xx rows of subtitle text (row contains 1-2 lines) where the video is 51 minutes long. It takes me another 30-60 minutes to split the rows in case one of them had more than 2 lines. It takes me 1-3 hours fixing the lines that contain both arabic and english. This depends on the occurence of such a state.

As for your second post, I do that too :D When I start, I just load the transcript into SW, set the max length for all the rows with the push of 3 buttons, then check if any of the rows have more than 2 lines and if so, i split them up. this takes time because i dont want a discussed idea to b split improperly between rows. By the way, Subtitle Edit has an IMPORT TIMECODES function. Lovely :D

Finally, regarding SPOTLIGHT and PREMIERE PRO, I contacted the creators of these applications and was told that they didn't create automatic timecodes. Spot light definitely doesn't do it. As for premiere, I saw a tutorial where premiere launched encore and encore analyzed a video. once that was over, the focus went back to premiere where an almost accurate transcript of the video was made available where if you press on any word in that transcript, you can see the time at which it appears in the video. Unfortunately, there's no export function of the time codes.

I haven't tried Final Cut because it's on a MAC and I haven't gotten one yet. Vegas also doesn't have what I want. Is it possible that no one has managed to create an application that just reads a wave and prints the beginning and ending times of every wave read/scanned in an audio stream? >.< Premiere came so close >.<

So thank you for all your help. Seriously :D Please, if you have any more ideas let me no. Currently I've managed to drop my hours from 8 to 4. The translators are translating the subtitle file instead of the transcript. So basically all I need to do is add teh time codes then fix whatever lines containing arabic and english together. Still it's not enough :P I need to shave off more time; application that can print the time codes for me. This way all I need to do is fix whatever lines that contain the languages/symbols/units.

Sigh......