Forum: Subtitling
Topic: Ask me anything about subtitling
Poster: Luciana Costas
Post title: Removing subtitles
[quote]José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:
[quote]Luciana Costas wrote:
How can I remove subtitles from a video? I've been asked to subtitle into Spanish an already subtitled short film (originally in German, subtitles in English) and I actually did it by myself - that is from scratch, I didn't extract the English subtitles in order to translate. Now both subtitles, English and Spanish, can be perfectly seen on screen and they certainly don't overlap, but both are pretty much the same size and it's quite annoying to read either of them. I just need to get rid of the English subtitles, I'm not interested in getting the original srt file actually (though I'd like to know too, in case it happens again). Any ideas? [/quote]
Like anything in digital video, there are more variables that can be included in a simple question.
The first check is to see if the subtitles are truly burnt on the video. There are some video file formats (mkv among them?) that allow including subtitles as if they were burnt, while they are not. It's tricky, but possible to remove them in this case.
Once I had this problem, they were actually burnt on the frames, and I chose to blur them, but only the area they occupied, and only when they appeared. It was a very tedious and time-consuming job, though the video was short, and the result was not as neat as I expected. It was the kind of blur used by TV stations to cover exposed genitalia and nipples, to get the idea clear. It took a whale of time for Sony Vegas to render that.
The neater solution I had was on an even shorter video, however I had to check whether it would work. In that case, it did. You can see it about halfway down on [url removed] . It was just a snippet from Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful", to be used for training. The film was spoken in Italian, but they only had it subtitled in English, and wanted Portuguese. So the left is a screencap of what I got, and the right is what I delivered. [/quote]
Hi José,
First, my apologies for replying so late. It turned out my client was ok with both subtitles on screen (though I'm not sure their clients would be!), so I didn't need to get rid of the English subtitles this time, then I forgot to reply.
I think your Portuguese subtitles turned out quite nicely actually! They don't look overlapped or blurred at all. May I ask what your method was in this case?
Topic: Ask me anything about subtitling
Poster: Luciana Costas
Post title: Removing subtitles
[quote]José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:
[quote]Luciana Costas wrote:
How can I remove subtitles from a video? I've been asked to subtitle into Spanish an already subtitled short film (originally in German, subtitles in English) and I actually did it by myself - that is from scratch, I didn't extract the English subtitles in order to translate. Now both subtitles, English and Spanish, can be perfectly seen on screen and they certainly don't overlap, but both are pretty much the same size and it's quite annoying to read either of them. I just need to get rid of the English subtitles, I'm not interested in getting the original srt file actually (though I'd like to know too, in case it happens again). Any ideas? [/quote]
Like anything in digital video, there are more variables that can be included in a simple question.
The first check is to see if the subtitles are truly burnt on the video. There are some video file formats (mkv among them?) that allow including subtitles as if they were burnt, while they are not. It's tricky, but possible to remove them in this case.
Once I had this problem, they were actually burnt on the frames, and I chose to blur them, but only the area they occupied, and only when they appeared. It was a very tedious and time-consuming job, though the video was short, and the result was not as neat as I expected. It was the kind of blur used by TV stations to cover exposed genitalia and nipples, to get the idea clear. It took a whale of time for Sony Vegas to render that.
The neater solution I had was on an even shorter video, however I had to check whether it would work. In that case, it did. You can see it about halfway down on [url removed] . It was just a snippet from Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful", to be used for training. The film was spoken in Italian, but they only had it subtitled in English, and wanted Portuguese. So the left is a screencap of what I got, and the right is what I delivered. [/quote]
Hi José,
First, my apologies for replying so late. It turned out my client was ok with both subtitles on screen (though I'm not sure their clients would be!), so I didn't need to get rid of the English subtitles this time, then I forgot to reply.
I think your Portuguese subtitles turned out quite nicely actually! They don't look overlapped or blurred at all. May I ask what your method was in this case?