Mastering Subtitling: Practical Approaches to Timing and Transcription (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: It's time to put into practice everything we've learned so far. We're going to take a video with no subtitles or transcript and caption it from start to finish. There are two basic approaches to doing this. We can time the subtitles first and then transcribe the dialogue, or we can transcribe first and then set the cues. We're going to do both in this lesson, and how you eventually do it is up to you. Let's open our project file. We'll start by doing cues, then text. I'll play the video and time a few subtitles. We'll do that using our three shortcuts, which are Insert, Delete, and Enter on the numpad, or Alt-P, Alt-Left Bracket, Alt-Right Bracket on the main keyboard. Now that we've timed a few subtitles, we fill in the text. One shortcut that is useful here is F4. When you press F4, you'll listen only to what's within the subtitle cues. You have access to this function also here on the toolbar. It's this little speech bubble, Play Current Subtitle. Right, so let's fill in the subtitles.

Speaker 2: Now let's go back and listen to this part. Okay, this is one example.

Speaker 1: Your solution may be different from ours, but now let's do the opposite. We're going to transcribe the text and then time it.

Speaker 2: I'll start from a different point. Let's start from here.

Speaker 3: This is one subtitle.

Speaker 1: Now let's go back and cue the subtitles that we've just created. This is a little late.

Speaker 4: All right.

Speaker 1: For this lesson, we've prepared a few video segments for you to subtitle. Each segment is accompanied by an answer key. But as subtitling isn't an exact science, these answer keys are actually suggestions. You'll see that the file names will contain Suggestion instead of Answer Key. We've also included PDF transcripts for each of the exercises. If you didn't do exactly what we did, that's okay. Compare your work to our suggestions and take note of the differences.