Well, already had that big, hair-pulling adventure a while back with subtitles on the last feature project. Getting friends to translate languages into subtitles (never again), which I then had to completely re-do in the powerful-but-obscure, no-manual app Annotation Edit…which was fine once learned… Anyway, I just want a base-line transcription of the American English spoken in a subtitle file and then send it out to a very professional translation company and pay properly to have them give me a suite of translations: French, Portuguese-Brazilian, Spanish-Latin-American, and Italian.
The most friendly / best / cheap way to get a translation / subtitle company working is to hand them a proper (trans)script. That will save them tons of time looking up strange words / city names etc.
For features, it's easy as it is scripted.
But even for doc style work it's doable. If you have a normal transcript, my Subbits can import that and convert it to subs. (that are way too long most of the time, but it's about keeping track of what you do.)
If you subsequence with SubCap and edit properly you can keep track of what you do, and export a very good 'offline' subfile as a base.
(Some of my clients are doing this, not only to have the sub department cheap, but also to have their Dutch editors be able to work with all kind of foreign languages.)
C) So you want to have a dirt cheap translation / transcription translated to another language, thus putting mistake on mistake, and you want that as cheap as possible?
Well no, Bouke, I was looking to take the cheap English transcription subtitle (or create one from the caption file) and the lay it into either MC or Annotation edit and correct it as needed, until it is as perfect as can be, in terms of actual language spoken and the timing of it on screen, and of course meeting the character-line spec for subtitles.
I don't know Annotation Edit, but my gut tells me it will be way faster than using MC / SubCap.
Perhaps it's only me, but the lat 10 years the Fx window always closes when I want it to stay open.
Then, MC gives no fast info on duration, let alone char count / duration relation.
Text editing in the SubCap FX window is horribly slow and annoying.
Oh, the character line spec is only interesting for meeting NetFlix specs. (Who, by the way, don't stick to their own rules, that are stupid anyways as they assume monospaced fonts.)
On nowadays playback, there is always more space than there is reading time, so it's quite hard to have a proper formatted two line title that falls of the screen.
Oh, you did shoot at least 4K HDR on an ARRI in some difficult LOG format, did you not?
You got me there, in that it's not 4K HDR on an Arri. It is HD ProRes 422 HQ. But it looks reeeeeeally good, and was lit, lensed, and mic'd professionally rather well, if I may say. And the subject matter is fascinating, particularly to an underserved audience, which is what I hope will attract attention for licensing.
(Otherwise it makes no sense to have it translated, people will refuse to watch it anyways since it thus sucks big time, as you were too cheap to shoot properly.)
That ain't the case, compadre.
You've missed the joke here ;-)
But, you are totally right. About 10% of the people have 'some' kind of hearing problem. Then there is the group that can't have the volume up, or just needs a bit of aid understanding the spoken words.
If subs are done well, your audience will claim that they 'did not need them at all'.
Compared to all the work involved, a proper caption / sub file is dirt cheap in comparison to the extra percentage of audience.
And I dare to state that a 'normal' budget for a feature / doc (Outsource plus your own QC/work to put them in) is at least 20 bucks a minute, and I do know how to work extremely fast on this kind of jobs.
I don't think you want my advice on your workflow, but you get the general idea anyways.
Thanks for fueling the conversation.
Advice still welcome… as always from the brain-trust of this venerated forum...
No worries, I'll make the .scc fly if it fails.
Very kind of you, thanks!
It's not kind, it's what I do for a living :-)
Bouke
Edit 'B /
VideoToolShed.comvan Oldenbarneveltstraat 33
6512 AS Nijmegen
+31 6 21817248
Roberto
Pure Grain Digital
Mountain View, CA
Good to hear about this. I'm thinking about using
Rev.com to create the .scc file for a 55 minute interview show (in English) I just finished in MC. My plan/hope is to also use that file as the basis for getting quotes for translations to other 3 other languages (from Comtranslations, which I've used before).
I have the Annotation Edit app and might be able to use that to get a clean .scc export that will import into MC. ??
Any advice or thoughts on this subtitle workflow are most welcome.
Thanks,
Roberto
Pure Grain Digital
Mountain View, CA
