Ask me anything about subtitling

Sergey Kondratyev wrote:

Hello, everyone.

I'm new on this forum,
but I do hope those well-experienced subtitlers/captioners
who come here from time to time may be able to help me with what I'm looking for.

And I'm looking for the style guide of Blu-Ray subtitles which was wildly used for Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Disney/Buena Vista (as well as content on Disney+) film releases up to approximately early 2023, before they decided to change the style for their subs (so rubbish, the new one, to my opinion).
Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

1. https://ibb.co/89VcxSF
2. https://ibb.co/cYPYvnn
3. https://ibb.co/kMtbQn0
4. https://ibb.co/QJ6zwkZ

Unfortunately, my try to find the company which might be responsible for doing subs in this style failed. I contacted SDI Media because I knew perfectly that Warner Bros got a contact with them for making subs in different languages for all stuff they release on Blu-Ray discs, but they gave categorical reply - this is not the style they used to work with; talking amongst the workmates here at Red Bee Media also went back with zero result - nobody has ever worked neither with this style nor on the projects for those mentioned above companies.

So, maybe somebody here, on this forum, ever got a chance to work for those big figures and using exactly that style for making subtitles.
It'd be great if you could share a copy of it (we all know the style guides aren't a classified information, because it doesn't disclose anything of a project you work on) for personal deep studying it and comparing its parts and recommendations with well known online BBC Subtitles Guidelines for iPlayer programmes.

Regards,
Sergey

Max Deryagin wrote:

Hi Sergey,

Hm, looks pretty generic, but at the same time this doesn't match any of the style guides I've worked with or had access to. As you said, this is likely the work of one specific company, and probably a large one, as they caption for at least a few biggest content producers. So, something like Iyuno, ZOO, TransPerfect, VSI or the like.

You could try a couple of things:
1. Find these movies in translation databases, see who did the translations, and ask those people which company they did it for.
- SUBTLE Base
- ATRAE Base de Datos (e.g. here is Coco)
- Le Big d'ATAA

2. Get a free one-month trial of IMDBPro and see whether the translation/captioning company is mentioned on the movie's page (this is a bit rare, but sometimes they are credited).

Dayang Norhamizah Awang Kamaludin wrote:

Hello everyone,

This is my first time posting in the forums so I'm hoping someone would help me on this one.
And this is also the first time I'm encountering this in my subtitling experience.

Say if the target language is in English and the speaker in the video speaks in English, do I have to make subtitles for it as well?
I'm not sure if there is any style guide I could refer to for this one.

Any help is appreciated!

Thank you in advance.

Susanta Chakraborty wrote:

I have a situation where two speakers speak the same sentence simultaneously, each sentence being 50 characters long, and truncation is not possible. What should I do?

For example:
-[speaker 1] "I'm speaking the same sentence along with my brother"
-[speaker 2] "I'm speaking the same sentence along with my brother"

The maximum allowed is two lines, each having 42 characters. How should I manage this?

[Edited at 2024-07-05 13:20 GMT]

[speaker 1 and speaker 2] "I'm speaking the same sentence along with my brother"

-[speaker 1] "I'm speaking the same sentence...
-[speaker 2] "I'm speaking the same sentence...

-...along with my brother"
-...along with my brother"

(Usually a bad approach, but since the text is the same, this could work.)

ammams wrote:

Greetings,
Titlebee was the best subtitle creator app I’ve ever used. It was easy, fast, and simple, with a multilingual subtitle editor, and almost the only one capable of creating Urdu subtitles.
Today, I found out the company might be permanently closed since the website is unavailable. I got a new laptop, but unfortunately, the app needs to connect to Titlebee servers once to verify registration which led me to discover the shutdown. So I couldn't finish the installation.
If anyone has worked with Titlebee or understands its concept, please recommend an alternative app?
Thank you!

Max Deryagin wrote:



Hi ammams,

I would personally go with the first option, but if it isn't possible for some reason, my software recommendations would be these:

1) YellaUmbrella's Stellar (if you need to edit/review several subtitle files simultaneously)
2) Subtitle Edit (if you're looking for a free tool)
3) Wincaps Q3 (if it's important for you that the waveform is vertical and displayed alongside subtitle boxes)
4) SubtitleNext (if you want a highly customizable, powerful tool for various task types)
5) OOONA (if you're looking for a great browser-based subtitling tool)
6) EZTitles (if you need a cutting-edge powerhouse for heavy professional work; my personal favourite)

Which one to choose will depend on your individual needs and your budget, so my advice would be to try out the trial versions and see which one feels like the best combination of price and quality for you.

Liliane Ribas de Freitas (Tambasco) wrote:

Hi Max
I hope all is well.
Once again, I'm looking for some advice from you.
Do you know, by any chance, anything about the courses from TranslaStars?
I am interested in a course they offer:
ProD+T Subtitling and Closed Captioning,
and I'm trying to get some references about it before enrolling.

https://www.translastars.com/course/subtitling-closed-captioning

Sean Warner wrote:

Hello,

I make recordings from my satellite decoder/DVR box. These are transport stream files - .ts - and they have teletext as well as dvb subtitle streams embedded in them.

I have been playing around with several different ways of extracting, modifying and injecting subtitles in to these .ts files, using tools such as Subtitle Edit and ffmpeg.

I know how to add a stream of dvb subtitles to a .ts file using ffmpeg.

I would like to know how to add a stream of teletext subtitles to a .ts file. I recently learned about eztitles which apparently can do that. But this is a paid plugin for another piece of software that is even more expensive.

My question:
What are the different ways to add a stream of teletext subtitles to a .ts file? Are there any free tools to do this in particular can it be done with ffmpeg?

Cheers,

Flex

Sean Warner wrote:

Hello Max,

Thanks a lot for getting back to me. I have a bunch of recordings I made from an old satellite decoder box PVR. For some reason the recordings were created as a series of 1GB .ts files (with sibling .dvr files). I have a little project going where I am combining the 1GB .ts files back in to ONE .ts file using TSDoctor.

Sometimes I get subtitles out of sync. I figured out how to fix out-of-sync subs in Subtitle Edit and re-insert them using ffmpeg as a stream of dvb subtitles but they never look as good as the teletext subtitles, at least in my opinion.

All my recordings also have a separate stream of teletext subtitles and ffmpeg can extract out those subtitles but as you say it seems ffmpeg is unable to insert/mux a stream of teletext subtitles IN to a ts container.

In my case I want to correct and re-insert subtitles in to a .ts container recording, I'm not dealing with live broadcasting. I don't really need to be able to do this I just got interested to know how this is normally done and if it can be done with free tools. I don't understand why it would need to be so much more complicated than how ffmpeg can generate a stream of dvb subtitles from a .srt file of text-based subtitles with timing information.

I am a linux user and took a look at OpenCaster. I really cannot figure out how to use it or if it could definitely do what I am trying to achieve.

Cheers,

Flex