Professional Software for Audiovisual Translation

Kelsey Frick wrote:

Hello,

Please forgive me if this has already been asked, but I'm doing some research into the best software available for both subtitling and dubbing. I've been looking into Adobe Premiere but I am unsure if there are any other industry standard software that handles both aspects well. Do you have any recommendations?

Max Deryagin wrote:

Adobe Premiere is not for subtitling/dubbing — it is for video editing and authoring.

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:



Most of my small-time video producing clients (fortunately not so many) only ask me for the translation for subtitles. They say their staff will take care of time-spotting and burning. Okay, I do it.

These are not so many, and when we get friendlier, I ask them how they do it. (Perhaps I'll get a valuable tip.)

To my dismay, most of them place the subtitles one by one as onscreen text, using... FinalCut! A couple reportedly used Adobe Premiere.

Just as an experiment, I tried to replicate the procedure using Sony Vegas. I wouldn't do it again even if I were serving a lifetime sentence in prison!

Yet they are happy doing it. They say those guys are on payroll anyway, doing nothing, so let them do it!

BTW once I tried generating (always neat!) subtitles with VirtualDub on a plain green screen, and then chroma-keying it as an overlay to the video on Sony Vegas. The subtitles came out so horrible, that I don't recommend trying that.

Sony Vegas has several variants. I have Platinum, but it won't burn subtitles. I checked with their support, and learned that the version that burns subtitles costs 6x the price of Platinum! No deal.

Max Deryagin wrote:
Hi Kelsey,

Adobe Premiere is not for subtitling/dubbing — it is for video editing and authoring.

What AVT tool to pick depends on your budget and particular professional needs, as well as what operating system you use.

If you use Mac OS, your best bet will be Annotation Edit, because it's cheap and good. If you need powerful functionality for closed captioning, go with MacCaption by Telestream.

If you use Windows, there's quite an assortment of tools to choose from. My favorite is, of course, EZTitles 5, which is the tool I use in work — but it's a bit on the expensive side. If you're short on cash, you can go with WinCAPS Q-Lite, another decent tool with the Pay-As-You-Go option, where you can pay on a per-hour-of-real-work basis.

Softel SWIFT is too expensive and a bit buggy, so I can't recommend it. Then there are other tools like SPOT, TitleVision Submachine, Monal LE and FAB subtitler — I don't recommend them either.

Hope this helps.

P.S. All these tools also work for dubbing AVT, but I think you can do away with free tools in this case.

[Edited at 2016-02-27 18:31 GMT]

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:
Go visit http://www.videohelp.com

There you'll find almost everything that is to be found about digital video, including dubbing and subtitling, user feedback, tutorials, URLs for downloading demos, the works!

Here on Proz some people will advocate for the most expensive software, that supposedly will make your job ten times easier, even if you don't know exactly what you are doing.

Other people - like me - will say that there is a lot of excellent freeware for video, unlike many other software specialties, particularly CAT tools, where expensive software often performs miserably, if compared. Nevertheless, the trick in using freeware is to know exactly what you are doing, how, and why.

Of course, there is plenty of freeware junk too, so the Rx is to try them out, one by one.