Software
1. Making subtitles
This may be of interest to teachers who wish to prepare texts and subtitled video clips for their students.
I use a simple, free, and very effective subtitle editor, SubCreator, by a programmer called Radoslav Strugalski who runs R-solve Software.
The following is an easy way to prepare subtitles.
First make your transcription, using a video player like AlShow which allows you to hop a few seconds backwards. Write it in Word format, if your students are going to use it, and write it making line breaks where there are natural pauses.
Here is a section from L'île de Paques
Et il suffit de grimper jusqu’au pied des
falaises pour découvrir le chantier,
la carrière où furent tirées les statues géantes de l’île de Pâques.
On peut y voir des dizaines de statues
inachevées, seulement ébauchées,
ou cassées avant même d’avoir pu être acheminées jusqu’au site
où elles devaient se dresser.
You need to get a feel for how long a line of subtitle text you want to put on the screen. In your Word document you make a line break every time you want a new subtitle to appear, and an empty line whenever no subtitle is to be shown
Save the document both in Word format to be printed, and as a text file.
In SubCreator load the movie and the text file. All you have to do now is synchronise the movie and the text. At the start of each section of speech to be subtitled, you simply press Ctrl-A. At the beginning of each section where no title is to appear, make sure you have a blank line, and press Ctrl-A
This is what you get:
00:01:32.0:
00:01:33.1:Et il suffit de grimper jusqu'au pied des falaises pour découvrir le
chantier,
00:01:36.4:la carrière où furent tirées les statues géantes de lîle de Pâques.
00:01:40.4:
00:01:51.8:On peut y voir des dizaines de statues inachevées, seulement
ébauchées,
00:01:55.4:ou cassées avant même davoir pu être acheminées jusquau site
00:01:58.8:où elles devaient se dresser.
It couldn't be simpler. Save your work as a text file so you can re-edit if necessary, but note that this is not the subtitle file !
To make this, select File->Export. You choose the format needed - I use SRT
Click on Convert, then Click on Save - and make sure the filename is the same as that of the video. If both the video and the .srt are in the same folder, the video player will display the subtitles automatically
That's all there is to it !
Making video clips for educational use - or to send to this site !
First catch your clip....
Much depends on the box that decodes your television. However, they've all got SCART outputs on the back, so the common denominator is a little box such as Pinnacle Systems Dazzle. One end plugs into the set-top box, the other into your computer, and allows you to record audio and video.
A better solution is the sort of box that will write to a USB drive. That way you get exactly what comes down from the satellite.
You may need to convert that raw format to MPG. I use VideoRedoPlus
The result is an enormous file - about 2 Gbytes per hour. Even an extract of five minutes will be too big to email or download
So I reduce the size without sacrificing too much quality with DivXAuthor. That will produce a file of about 30Mbytes per five minutes