A subtitle editor is a type of software used to create and edit

subtitles Subtitles and captions are lines of dialogue or other text displayed at the bottom of the screen in films, television programs, video games or other visual media. They can be transcriptions of the screenplay, translations of it, or informati ...

to be superimposed over, and synchronized with, video. Such editors usually provide video preview, easy entering/editing of text, start, and end times, and control over text formatting and positioning. Subtitle editors are available as standalone applications, as components of many

video editing Video editing is the manipulation and arrangement of video shots. Video editing is used to structure and present all video information, including films and television shows, video advertisements and video essays. Video editing has been dramaticall ...

software suites, and as web applications.

Purpose

In television, subtitles are used for "clarification, translation, services for the deaf, as well as identifying places or people in the news." In movies, subtitles are mainly used for translations from foreign languages. Subtitles are frequently used to provide informative details regarding the action on screen, such as the names and titles of interview subjects, a discussion topic change, to spell out web URLs or email addresses, to assist understanding speakers who mumble, details in instructional videos such as recipe ingredients, and humorous effects such as commentary or contradictory captions.Cotrell Bryant, p.160 Each subtitle, during editing, consists of text, a start time, an end time or duration, and optional text styling and positioning.Sahlin, Doug (2003)
How to do everything with Adobe Encore DVD

McGraw-Hill McGraw Hill is an American educational publishing company and one of the "big three" educational publishers that publishes educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education. The company also publishes referen ...

Osborne Media. p. 262. Time is measured either in video frames, in milliseconds, or in hours:minutes:seconds.frames/milliseconds. The exact format and separator characters(colon, period, comma, etc.) are determined by the subtitle format chosen. A capable subtitle editor can convert one time measurement system into another without error.

Editor features

A subtitle editing tool will typically have these features: * Capable of displaying a variety of video formats, loading and saving a wide variety of subtitle file formats * Video preview: simultaneous, synchronized playback of video and subtitles, with pause/play and fine adjustment over video: jog/shuttling/slow-motion * Text entry and editing ** Search and replace of text to correct names, etc. **

Spell check In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic di ...

** Change text encoding for UTC−8, Unicode, etc. * Change the duration of a given subtitle's display * Shift subtitles or a block of subtitles back and forth in time * Change subtitle format (

MicroDVD MicroDVD is a subtitle file format for digital video. Its name is derived from the MicroDVD Player, a media player application designed to play DVD videos along with subtitles, originally developed by Tiamat Software. The application was first r ...

, MPSub,

SubRip SubRip is a free software program for Microsoft Windows which extracts subtitles and their timings from various video formats to a text file. It is released under the GNU GPL. Its subtitle format's file extension is .srt and is widely support ...

, ...) * Changing the time base

frame rate Frame rate (expressed in or FPS) is the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images (frames) are captured or displayed. The term applies equally to film and video cameras, computer graphics, and motion capture systems. Frame rate may also be c ...

24, 25, 29.995, 30, etc. Editors used by broadcasters may have additional features: * Speech to text functionality, either for creation of offline subtitles, or for live respeaking * Manual cue - allowing the user to manually 'play out' a subtitles to a range of output devices * Live subtitling - where subtitles are created in real time for a live programme, usually via some fast typing method (e.g. steno, shortforms, or respeaking, and the subtitles are fed to external systems for transmission with the programme. See the general description of subtitles for further description. Not all editors are equally flexible in terms of video formats, subtitle formats, or ease of use.

Examples of subtitle editors

Aegisub Aegisub is a subtitle editing application. It is the main tool of fansubbing, the practice of creating or translating unofficial subtitles for visual media by fans. It is the successor of the original SubStation Alpha and Sabbu. Aegisub's de ...

- Free. Linux, OS X, Windows. * Amara - Free. * Gnome Subtitles - Free. * Subtitle Edit - Free and Open Source under GPL License. * Subtitle Composer - Free, open source, part of

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

Related software

- Free. Not an editor, but used to extract subtitles from VOB or hard subbed video files by

optical character recognition Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...

to a subtitle file.Extracting Subtitles From VOB to SRT
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Avidemux Avidemux is a free and open-source software application for non-linear video editing and transcoding multimedia files. The developers intend it as "a simple tool for simple video processing tasks" and to allow users "to do elementary things in a ...

- Free. Avidemux is video editing software that can be used to extract subtitles like SubRip. * VobSub/VSFilter/DirectVobSub - not an editor, but a

Windows Windows is a group of several Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, W ...

add-on (

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

filter) which displays subtitles during video playback.

References

External links

* Díaz-Cintas, Jorge (2008)
The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation (Benjamins Translation Library)

John Benjamins Publishing John Benjamins Publishing Company is an independent academic publisher in social sciences and humanities with its head office in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The company was founded in the 1960s by John and Claire Benjamins and is currently manage ...