Over the years of work, I have noticed an alarming trend — many otherwise capable subtitlers will often follow their client’s guidelines too strictly, almost dogmatically, without a real understanding of why those guidelines are the way they are and not knowing when to deviate from them to ensure the audience’s viewing comfort. This leads to countless subtitling errors, because no matter how robust and well-thought-out a style guide is, there will always be gaps in it, and so there’ll be moments when you need to make a judgement call based on your expertise rather than a written prescription.
In this new article series, I’d like to stress the importance of a thoughtful, intelligent approach to subtitling and to highlight some of those gaps, starting with arguably the biggest one.
At the same time, when given creative freedom, the most skilled and experienced subtitlers don't obsess over that number as much everyone else seems to believe, because they know just how unreliable it can be, for multiple reasons.
First of all, as I wrote in one of my previous articles, CPS and WPM consider only the volume of subtitle text but not its other properties, such as complexity or format. Unfamiliar words, tricky syntax, puzzling dialogue, italics and some other things will slow down your reading, and these two metrics simply do not reflect that.
Max Deryagin’s Subtitling Studio
How To Generate Shot Changes In Subtitle Edit
If you want to add shot changes to the waveform in Subtitle Edit, you don’t have to painstakingly go frame-by-frame and add them manually. Instead, you can auto-generate shot changes by using a feature that not many people know about. Here is how it’s done:
1. Download FFmpeg from here. Make sure you select the right version and architecture for your computer’s operating system:
You don’t need to install FFmpeg — just extract the archive’s contents into a folder.
2. Launch Subtitle Edit, go to Options > Settings > Waveform/spectrogram. There, in the bottom-right corner, check Use FFmpeg for wave extraction and add the path to the file ffmpeg located in your folder:
3. Open your video and add the waveform by clicking on the corresponding UI element:
4. Go to Video > Import Scene Changes, click Get scene changes with FFmpeg and wait until the program finishes its job.
5. Done! Now the waveform will have shot changes shown as vertical white lines:
(Note that the approach described above doesn’t currently work for the languages that have the comma as the decimal separator. If this is the case for you, you can use SE Beta for the time being. The issue will be fixed in the next update scheduled to come out in August 2018.)