Movie subtitler software software#

It had all you needed, except the background color for the subtitle was black, which bothered everyone. We used SoftNi, the first PC-based subtitling system.

Movie subtitler software software#

The software was run through a floppy disk drive in DOS. However, the computer didn’t have a hard drive. I did only a few movies this way before the company provided me with access to a computer. Sometimes the light source would burn the film, and if that happened, we would have to cut the piece that burned and splice it back together. 2 We would load film reels while performing some sleight of hand to get the celluloid to go into the Moviola’s many nooks and crannies so that it could be run.

The Moviola was an editing machine that allowed a film editor to view the film while editing. Moviola and Computers: Then I started working the night shift for a bigger company, arriving just in time to see them transitioning from a Moviola to computers and a three-quarters VCR. We would then take a large stack of pages to the editing room to be typed by the Chyron 1 operator so the subtitles could later be burned into the film reels. There were no spellcheckers available, so the writing had to be perfect at that point. We would then have to convert that number of frames into spaces, translate the dialogue mentally, count the characters to see if they fit in the space allowed, and finally write it down with a pencil. My colleagues and I would listen to the dialogue on the video played in a three-quarters VCR (the width of the film was three-quarters of an inch), pause it, write the in time and out time, and subtract the in time from the out time to get the duration of the subtitle.

When I started translating audiovisual content, linguists in the industry weren’t called “audiovisual translators,” but “movie translators.” I worked on paper that was formatted with spaces for the title, page number, in time (the time at which the subtitle appears on-screen), out time (the time at which the subtitle disappears), and the translation, which was divided by letter. After a brief overview of the technological developments in this field, we’ll review the pros and cons of some of the top programs on the market, including a peek into the future of subtitling and closed-captioning software.