I'd like to release some information on the video subtitling software project I have been developing, originally as a personal project to save work subtitling (laughs) and avoid the tedious and error prone text/title editing experience in Final Cut, and, (as I have discovered) Premiere too.
As well as tedious, subtitling is also horrendously expensive, beyond the budget of a community TV producer in Melbourne. Over the past couple of months Community Media Services(CMS) have supported the project in the hope that it will bring subtitling financially and logistically into the reach of community producers with non-English-language shows on Channel 31, by reducing the job of subtitling to it's core, the translation.
There have been a few teething problems as I have been broadening the usability of what originally was a commandline script into something with an informative and easy to use GUI, and in formalising input formats for clarity, ease of use and reliability. I hope the delay has not disappointed anyone who has heard about all this a while ago. Anyway I'd like to share a little bit of information about `metatitler'.
The idea is that a transcript of a translation, with timecode placed in it, as well as any non-title scene description and other metadata, be used to generate a timeline of titles matching the original video source of the translation which can simply be copied and pasted over the original video, and voila: subtitled video.
For Final Cut Pro, metatitler generates it's titles in the xml that FCP imports and exports. With premiere I can currently generate slightly dodgy titles containing the target text, but getting it in time awaits more work on a plugin for premiere, which I am itching to get started on, but the Final Cut Pro version is functional now, so I have been working on standardised import formats and a reliable beta candidate, so our testers can really get underway.
I'd like to thank Michael Jones and David of the test department, Mei Feng, who supplied the first translation titles were successfully generated from, and of course Steve Middleton, Sam Perla, and Joe Espeja for showing faith in me and my crazy project.
I will be linking this blog to the subtitling area of the MC2 website. I also hope go opensource and post the source code on sourceforge - and invite any interested soul to track or even contribute to the project, whether in writing or testing or documenting code.
Anyone with any suggestions or insight is invited to post their thoughts, and equally I'll post my own thoughts and queries in the hope that someone might have an interesting idea, or be able to enlighten me in my confusion.
And of course we need your videos...
John O'Driscoll
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next post:
some xml formats
sorry a bit technical
