Subtitles, How to make? Options

[Puscifer]

Well, my question regards the question of Subtitles.
If you 'hardcode' subtitles into the movie, it will like 10x the rendering time, and that's no fun. But you can get alot of subs in standalone files which should be easier to pull off...

How do you make such subs? The kind that makes an overlay on existing film, like the one you get on dvds and stuff?
I could probably find this somewhere else, but I believe you people can guide me to a good guide on how to do this.
- Thanks in advance.

[Zirivieon]

Well first of all, you have to turn on your computer. THEN you tell the subtitle monkey (can buy one for about 5$ at your nearby immigrant-shop) to start writing it all in for you while you play the lottery. Then you're even more random by buying your nice old moma a beer.... Savvy? Got any wiser? No, hm. Try making the subtitles in a different file and then do a overlay =D

[Puscifer]

Aha...

Or just use "SubtitleCreator" which I haven't tried yet but heard good things about. Mwoooo!

[Dead Workers Par...]

Depending on which video editor you use, it's as simple as creating a title with a transparent background and overlaying your video. The only tricky part is the timing of your text to appear and dissapear on cue.

[Oxhorn]

I just do it manually, sentence by sentence, and gauge how long the text should be there based upon the speed of the dialog. It is time consuming, and really annoying with APP7.0, which is why I don't put subtitles in many of my movies.

Now, Google Video has a nice way of doing it, but it, too, is time consuming. If you upload your video to Google Video, you can also upload a .txt file with all your subtitles in it. Then you have to go through the .txt file and put in time markers before each line, so that it can tell the computer when to display the subtitles. Upload this .txt file along with your movie, and then, if anyone wants to see subtitles, they can press the CC button on the Google Video player, and the subtitles will appear.

I've only done this with one of my movies, to test it out and see how it worked. I did it with Red Snappah! and you can see how it turned out here (it wasn't perfect):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6...p;q=red+snappah

[Elf]

Subtitle workshop and VirtualDub can play nicely together as a last stage in production if you want subtitles. There is a virtualdub filter available which will bake the subtitles down into video. Just remember to use this as a step before lossy encoding, not after, to avoid quality loss. That is to say - operating on uncompressed/losslessly compressed video is a good thing.

[Puscifer]

Ah yes, thanks for the suggestions ^^