Creating or editing movie subtitles

November 30, 2008

Today I had to add subtitles to a short movie. Problem is, I had never done that before, I’ve seen subtitle files but never actually done any changes to them. Let alone create subtitles!

So, I go to my Ubuntu’s Add/Remove Programs app to look for what is available for me. I found and installed Gnome Subtitles.

The program was pretty simple to use. I opened a video, started transcribing the audio myself into the subtitle lines at the bottom of the screen and pressed Ctrl+Enter when I wanted a separate subtitle line. Gnome Subtitle has a movie preview window so that I could see exact time (or frame) any dialogue was spoken for me to sync the subtitles to.

The program even offers a nice hand when translation of a subtitle needs to be done. Which will be the second part of my task (for another day).

After everything was written and synced, I saved the file to .srt and .sub formats (Gnome Subtitles supports several other formats as well).

Life is soooo easy on a Linux machine… Not much time wasted into finding and installing the program and the program is of excellent quality. Task accomplished!

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Posted in Audio and Video