Subbing An Episode
From Hak5
So you've found this most excellent movie clip that you want to share amongst your friends. Unfortunately the spoken language or dialect of the movie is one that your friends have difficulty with, or maybe your friends have bad hearing. The best way to deal with this situation is to add subtitles to the movie clip.
Contents |
Prerequisites
- Something to extract the audio from the movie
- A sound editor that shows precise timing
- Your text editor of choice
Subbing
Extracting the audio
mplayer -vo null -ao pcm -ao pcm:file=destination.wav movie.avi
destination.wav - Name of the destination file.
movie.avi - Name of the source movie. Can be any format MPlayer supports.
Sound editor
You can't beat Audacity for this. Available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.
audacity destination.wav
Subtitle file format
The most common and widely supported subtitle format is the SubRip format. To associate the subtitle file with a specific movie file, you should name your subtitle file exactly the same as the movie file, however using a different extension. SubRip files traditionally use .srt as extension, but .txt is known to work aswell.
The format of a SubRip file looks like this:
Subtitle number
Start time --> End time
One or two lines of subtitle text
Blank line
An example from the subtitles for Hak.5 episode 2:
58 00:03:47,463 --> 00:03:50,241 I mean, it's not like, you know... 59 00:03:50,250 --> 00:03:53,793 I guess everybody remembers the arcade cabinet before we put the... 60 00:03:54,010 --> 00:03:55,903 ...contact paper. - Well, that was MDF.
When a single sentence extends beyond what can be shown in 1 subtitle entry, split the text across 2 subtitle entries, ending the first and starting the second with three dots ('...').
When 2 people are talking and you need the text of both persons on screen at the same time, the lower line should be prefixed with a dash and a space ('- ').
To make sure the subtitles fit on the screen, keep the lines under 50 characters long.
Subtitling songs
When a song is being sung, and you want or need to signify this and/or you want or need to subtitle its lyrics, there is a specific format for this.
# Artist - Song title #
# Line from the song
# Last line from the song #
Note the extra '#' on that last line.
Creating your subtitles
Start by opening the audio stream in Audacity. Audacity starts off with the entire sound stream in view. This is typically far too condensed to be usable. Using the zoom button (magnifying glass with a plus in it) in the upper-right corner zoom in until you have between 10 and 15 seconds of sound on screen. The slider at the bottom allows you to navigate through the sound stream. Move it all the way to the left, if you weren't there already, so you're now looking at the beginning of the audio stream.
Select a section of the sound stream. Let Audacity's visual presentation of the sound profile guide you in deciding from where to where to select. You can move the selection boundaries afterwards, so this doesn't have to be an exact science. Now, click the play button at the center-top of the screen. A green bar will move across the selected area as the sound is being played. Listen closely to what you hear, and try to remember where that green bar is at points of silence. To replay your selection you need to click the stop button and then click the play button again (this may just be a bug in my version). Move the selection boundaries around until you have isolated a section of sound that you feel would be the proper length both time- and text-wise to become a subtitling entry. In the lower-left part of the screen Audacity will be displaying the start and end time of your selection. There's a drop-down list next to it that describes the units for these fields, make sure it's set to 'hh:mm:ss milliseconds'. You now have all the information required to add an entry to your subtitles file.
It's important to note that with Audacity, when the green bar is displayed in your selection, you can't move the slider at the bottom away to any point in the stream where the green bar wouldn't be visible. This remains true even when the selected sound snippet has stopped playing. Click the Stop button to get rid of the green bar, and you can once again slide around to your heart's content.
Additional considerations
It's important to realise when you're subbing a movie clip that it's more important to capture what is being said than what they're saying. When translating the text to a different language, feel free to use synonyms or local proverbs.
Word jokes tend to not translate well. Don't bother trying to explain the joke in the subtitle. Just translate what's being said, and if they don't get the joke, well, tough.
Sometimes the person talking is significantly impaired in his ability to produce a coherent sentence due to his drug use (usually covered up with silly excuses such as an unfortunate incident involving metal roofing sheets or something equally ludicrous). When the speaker produces a simple slip-up, like missing a letter in an abbreviation, it's appropriate and desirable to correct the speaker in your subs. When the mistake is more significant, it's best to just leave the text intact. Nobody will chastise you for not correcting a mistake, but people do tend to ask questions when the subtitles significantly differ from what's actually being said, even when what's being said is factually or grammatically wrong.
Sometimes the movie clip will simply display text on the screen, potentially with a bit of background music. If the text presented contains actual text that you feel you should sub, listen very closely to the sound being played, and make a mental note of where in the music the text on the screen changes (assuming this happens at all). You now have the total time that a body of text is on the screen. Type up this text in your subtitle file, and chop it up into separate lines like you would with regular subtitle entries, however using more than 2 lines. Next, devide the total time by the total amount of lines. This is the total time that a single line entry should be shown. Simply double it for double-line entries. Be sure to look at the movie with your subtitles afterwards to make sure you've got the timing right, as there's usually not a clear visual reference in the sound track presented to you by Audacity.
Sometimes a lot is being said in quick succession, and the viewing public needs to be given the chance to actually read the subtitles. Plus, you only have 100 characters total for any given subtitle entry, so you may need to at times be creative with how you display your lines. Some of the things you can try:
- Leave stuff out
A lot of times, lines are started with 'So', 'Now,' or similarly useless words. Sometimes the other person is simply says 'Yes' 'No' 'Great' or similar fluff that spice up the conversation, but add nothing to the actual message being conveyed. When space is tight, these should be the first items to be dropped.
- Split things up
When a lot is being said, the person saying it needs to come up for air every so often. If the person he's saying it to then takes this as a cue to start talking you might not have sufficient room to add the text of the other person under the first person's line. Simply make 2 subtitle entries, the first one entirely devoted to the text of the first person and the second for the text of the other person. The time that the subtitles for the text of the first person is on screen will be limited by this, but there will be less text for the viewer to grok so it should even out.
- Reduce the time a sub is shown
This is a bit tricky because the person reading the subs should be given sufficient time to read the text on the screen. When the person talking in the movie is talking really, really fast like they do in those bad commercials to say something they don't want to but have to by law, feel free to show the text briefly aswell.
Subbing, the Easy Way
I found a another way of creating srt formatted subtitles with a neat little piece of freeware named Subtitle Workshop. With Subtitle Workshop, you do not need to download several other pieces of software to be able to create subtitles.
Using Sub Workshop
I find that this method is much faster at creating subs from scratch. How this piece of software works is that you declare a start point of a sub with the appropriate button or ALT Z, and the end point with it's button or ALT X. Once the two are detected, it automatically creates a sub entry with no text in it, so all you have to do is fill in the text and fix the timing by editing and pressing ENTER, if necessary. Move on until your finished.
Features
- Thousandth of a second timing.
- Fast, on-video preview of subs.
- Supports A LOT of subtitle formats.
- Supports most video formats including [Divx]
- Fast TO NEXT SUB and TO PREVIOUS SUB buttons that make finding subs easy.
- Add your subs directly to your movie when you are finished.
- It's free!
[http://www.urusoft.net/download.php?lang=1
Another easy way to make Subs (linux)
Using subtitle Editor
This method allows you to just import the movie and create subtitles by selecting your timeframe.
Debian & Ubuntu users : apt-get install subtitleeditor
usage
When subtitleEditor is open, menu Timing > Open Media and select your video you want to create subtitles for. (might take a while) After that, you create a new file by "File > New"
Once you've got the window infront of you with on the left the video, right of it the sound and under it, you'll see a blanco screen. Use the "Insert key" to make a new subtitle line. Don't worry about the time indication, once you've created a new entry (with the "Insert" key, use the mouse to alter the selected time frame. Every time you want to create a new line for the subtitle use the "Insert" key.
Basically that's it. Save as .srt and voila :) done. (don't forget to name the subtitle exactly the same as your movie)
my two cents Jayze 15:55, 20 November 2008 (CST)