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
Custom Design for YouTube Captions
Recently I came across something curious and couldn’t help but share it with you guys.
We all know the standard look of YouTube’s closed captions, right? — white text over a black background, centered at the bottom:
It’s been the same for many years, and we are quite used to it.
But what if I told you that you can customize the design in multiple ways — font, size, color, position, etc. —not only for yourself but also for all your viewers? Like this:
(enable CC to view the captions)
These aren’t burned-in — you can turn them on and off! Pretty cool, isn’t it? — And quite easy to do.
How to
So, how do we make our subs look different? How do we spice them up? — Well...
Believe it or not, YouTube doesn’t allow us to do such customization via the officially supported CC formats, such as SRT, VTT and TTML. However, as it turns out, there is one undocumented format — the native SRV3, also known as YTT (YouTube Timed Text) — which gives access to quite a few interesting styling options.
And the beautiful thing is that, even though no subtitling software allows direct creation of SRV3 captions, there’s a special tool that converts ASS subs straight into YTT — YTSubsConverter. So, your job is to create Advanced Substation Alpha subtitles with the style that suits you (with some limitations), convert them, and upload the result to your YouTube video. And that’s it!
YTSubsConverter works on Windows, Mac and Linux, and comes with a full, well-written documentation, which you can find over the link above. And if you don’t quite know how to make ASS subs in Aegisub, TJFREE’s tutorials will come in handy.
(Or, you know, you could just burn-in your subtitles... but that’s up to you!)
Alright, this is it for now. As always, if you have any questions, thoughts, or remarks, feel free to share them in a comment below (or on social media).
Until next time!