Discussion: Add your subtitling tips!

[calmansi]

Hi Music Captioners,

I thought it would be great if we could share together the subtitling tips we have evolved. In fact, the Amara software can be used in many different ways, beyond the ones explained in the Solutions section of the Help menu.

I suggest we use one comment to this post per tip, then we add relevant tags to the main post. In order to add a comment, you can either join this Google group (1) or - if you don't want to join this group - you can send it to me, either via Amara messaging from my Amara profile, or via e-mail: claude....@gmail.com, and I'll post it for you.

(1) If you choose to join this group, be aware that there are sometimes avalanches of messages, because I make one for each video added to the team. So it might be a good idea to choose a digest form or read on the web. Joining is free (not moderated).

[calmansi]

Using an existing transcript (subtitles in the original language)

Many of the music videos that get added to the team are songs whose lyrics can be found online. If the lyrics are long, it's probably quicker to put them in a .txt file - using blank lines to separate the subtitles you want. But if they are reasonably short, you can also

• copy them in one go, then paste them into the first subtitle
• cut all lines except the first one
• hit Enter to save the first subtitle.

Then again:

• paste what you have cut into the second subtitle
• cut all lines except the first one
• hit Enter to save the second subtitle.

Etc.

[calmansi]

From Dawn Jones
http://iheartsubtitles.wordpress.com/:

"I have a good practice tip relating something more likely to come up when captioning/subtitling music. 
If a lyric is repeated, when you sync your subtitles try to create a gap between end of first lyric, and start of second repeated lyric. 
This ensure that there is a 'blink' on and off visually between each lines and indicates to the viewer that the lyric is sung twice -
Obviously sync this to the audio in the same way you would any subtitle.
If you don't put a gap in there is no visual clue that this line is sung more than once and  your subtitles will end up looking like one line and one lyric no matter how many times you type it. Hope that makes sense."

[Richard Gresswell]

Hi Dawn, all

Good point Dawn. I think the more visual clues the better with subs, and this is a good one.

All the best.

Richard

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From: calmansi <claude....@gmail.com>
To: musicca...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Saturday, 17 November 2012, 21:12
Subject: [musiccaptioning group] Re: Discussion: Add your subtitling tips!

From Dawn Jones
http://iheartsubtitles. wordpress.com/:

--
See also the Amara Music Captioning team: http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/
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