Subtitle Edit 3.2 Help

Mini FAQ

Help index

Subtitle Edit main window

Menu in main window

Subtitle/file formats

In the top menu you can choose format and encoding. The first dropdown list shows subtitle formats. SubRip (extension is ".srt") is the most widely used format today, so it is recommended to save subtitles in this format. Originally SubRip was a text only format, but in recent years html tags have been common. Especially the italic and font tags are widely used. For a list of SubRip support in players check this out. File encoding is auto detected in most cases. ANSI is the old, most common found format today, but it requires your system to have a specific culture setting. UTF-8 is recommended for new subtitles, as it can handle non English letters better than ANSI (UTF-8 subtitles will work on all computers no matter what culture settings a computer have), and can display other symbols like music nodes. The only drawback of using UTF-8 is, that some older programs do not support UFT-8 and WinXP only has a few semi-unicode fonts (Lucida Sans Unicode, Time New Roman, Courier New). If you have an ANSI file in another language than the current culture/language (or you have an invalid UTF/Unicode file) then you can use the menu item: File -> Import subtitle with manual chosen encoding. Import subtitle with manual chosen encoding with preview:

Frame rate

Frame rate is no longer displayed by default, but you can enable it via the menu Options -> Settings: Toolbar: Show frame rate in toolbar. Frame rate is used when converting between subtitle formats based on frames and formats based on time. SubRip is based on time. MicroDvd (widely used 7-9 years ago) is based on frames. Subtitles based on time is preferred as videos may not have a constant frame rate - which makes working with subtitles based on frames not very flexible at all. To change the frame rate use Synchronization -> Change frame rate - or use one of the other synchronizations tools.

Subtitle view - List view or source view

There are two ways of looking at a subtitle - list view or source view.

This is how the subtitle file actually looks - different for all formats. You can edit text and time codes here, but be careful - it's also easy to mess things up. You can make Subtitle Edit start in Source view under Settings.

The list view gives an excellent overview of the subtitle - the same for all formats. You can edit text and time codes here, delete and insert lines easily.

It is also possible to select several lines and use tools like Google translate or Visual sync on the selected lines.

TextBox Above the textbox where you can type the actual subtitle is a label called "Char/sec". If it's higher than 25 it will be colored orange/red. Below the textbox is a label called "Single line length". First line is 33 characters and second line is 75 characters. The color referrers to how long current line is compared to Settings -> Options : General : Single line max length (43 is default). Red means too long, orange means it's close to max.

Show video and/or waveform/spectrogram The main window can show video and/or wave form. Video controls can even be un-docked - nice if you have two monitors! The horizontal/vertical red lines shows where you can resize inside the main window (via splitters).

It's now possible to edit both new translation and original subtitle at the same time. Default, the original is read-only, but you can change that in Options -> Settings:General:Allow edit of original subtitle. Shortcuts: Ctrl+U will toggle original subtitle. Ctrl+Shift+U will switch translated / original subtitle. When editing both original and translated subtitle, changing start time/duration/deleting/inserting will affect both subtitles!

Search

You can search by pressing Ctrl+F (F3 is find next). Regular expression search is available for nerds ;)

Video/wave form modes

Translate mode

Create mode

Adjust mode

Wave form

Wave form mouse/keys usage:

• Mouse single click: Go to position
• Mouse double click on existing subtitle: Select clicked subtitle
• Mark area + right click on marked area: Prompt for add new paragraph / play current selection
• Mouse drag left/right border of subtitles (adjusting start or end time)
• Move/drag on middle of subtitle (adjusting both start and end time - but not duration)
• Mouse right click can either add new subtitle or perform delete/split/merge on existing subtitle line
• Mouse wheel scrolls waveform forward/back
• alt+arrow left/right moves video position
• alt+arrow up/down goes previous/next subtitle
• Numeric +/- will zoom in/out
• Mouse single click+Shift will set start for selected line (not moving end time)
• Mouse single click+Ctrl will set end for selected line (not moving start time)
• Mouse single click+Alt will set start for selected line (and keep duration)
• Mouse double click on non-paragraph - toggle play
• Mouse single click+Ctrl+Shift will set of start selected line + offset all lines after selected line (keeping durations)

Wave extraction

Synchronization

Subtitle Edit offers several ways to synchronize subtitles. Adjust all times (show earlier/later): This is useful if you for example need to show all texts 3 seconds earlier. Visual sync: Sync by matching start/end scene (more below). Point sync: This allows synchronization by using 2 or more points - sync point time codes can be entered manually which makes it easy to use time codes from another subtitle already in sync. Point sync via other subtitle: If you have another subtitle in sync (perhaps in another language - it helps if you can understand it a bit) you can match one of the first lines, match one of the last lines, sync, and then all lines should be in sync. Change frame rate: This makes it easy to match text from a video with one frame rate to a video with another frame rate (can also be done by visual sync or point sync).

Visual sync

Visual sync is a really easy way to synchronize a subtitle with a video file. Match one of the first subtitle lines with the start scene. Then match one of the last subtitle lines with the end scene. Press "Sync!" - and that's it :) There are a few helper buttons which will help find the right place in the video where the subtitle should start (just about where the first word comes out). The "Play 1 sec and back" button is a test button, so you can easily very that the current position really is correct. Also check the Shortcuts. In some cases a subtitle is impossible to synchronize because one or more scenes have been removed/added. In these cases you can select a number of subtitles in the subtitle list view, right click and choose Visual sync selected lines. This way you can adjust the subtitle in smaller parts.

Translation (auto)

Fix common errors

Import/OCR image based subtitles - like DVD Sub/idx or Blu-ray sup

• OCR via Tesseract 3 (recommended): Tesseract is an open source OCR engine.
  You can find additional language data files at the Tesseract Google code project. These Tesseract dictionary files need to be unpacked to [Subtitle Edit folder]\Tesseract\tessdata.
  
  If you right-click in the list view, you will get a context menu with these options:
  
  Import text with matching time codes... can be used to continue working on an earlier created subtitle.
  Save subtitle image as... allows for saving current image as either pgn, gif, bmp, or tiff.
  Save all images with html index display all subtitles images in an html page - for easy proof reading.
  
  OCR via Tesseract will work best if you also have spell check dictionaries.
  
  prompt for unknown words and Try to guess unknown words will only work if a dictionary is available. Fix OCR errors will also benefit from a dictionary.
  
  The prompt for unknown words will look like this (window is re-sizable):
  
  Edit whole text will enable editing of the whole text (and not only the current word) - for this one sub only.
  Change all / Use always will change current word always - also in future works (saved in the OCR Fix Replace list - take a look at Dictionaries/eng_OCRFixReplaceList.xml to learn more about this file).
  Change / Use will change current word just this once.
  Add to names/noise list (case sensitive) will remember this name with current casing - also in future works.
  Add to user dictionary will remember this word and not prompt for it any more - also in future works.
  
  
  
• OCR via image compare: This option does not require any third party software installed, but it does require the user to manually enter letters based on image parts.
  "No of pixels is space" should be decreased if not all translated words are separated (like "wearefine."), and increased if there are too many separations (like "w e ar e fi n e.").
  Note: This does not work well with Blu-ray sup files!
  
  
• OCR via MODI: MODI is short for Microsoft Office Document Imaging. It's included with Microsoft Office Tools ("Microsoft Office \ Microsoft Office Tools" folder in the start menu).
  This works a lot like Tesseract, but requires MS Office.
  If you do have Microsoft Office installed but the MODI OCR is not available do try to run the MS Office setup again and make sure that MODI is selected in the setup program.
  

Shortcuts

Translating Subtitle Edit to another language

Networking - online collaboration

Video player and codecs

SE command line conversion

Portable version and VLC

Compiling Subtitle Edit

Known issues