The document window has a Movie section. This section will allow you to import a Quicktime movie and to simulate the subtitle spotting while playing the movie. Spotting is the process to define at which moment a title starts and at which moment it ends.
Spotting is an Art on itself which needs both sense of rhythm and knowledge on the language. To work effectively, you also need a feeling to find a good compromise in a reasonable amount of times, which is some seconds. This said, after some self-training, an experienced editor is able to to a successful spotting.
There are different criteria how to define the rhythm of a title and they are often contradictionary:
You will find out yourself your way. Before you make your first subtitles, you may go to the theatre and analyze the subtitling of international movies.
Now back to Subtitler:
Import the movie with the menu command File:Import Movie. We recommend using movies in MPEG4, MPEG1 or DV compression, but your choice may depend of the performance of your Macintosh.
Note: If you use Final Cut Pro, you should not export a Final Cut Pro movie (menu File:Export:Quicktime Movie with a FCP icon) but export a Quicktime movie (menu File:Export:Using Quicktime Conversion with a native Quicktime icon).
In the Movie section, set the framerate and the offset. The offset is the TimeCode of the first frame of the movie.
Playing and marking is entirely driven by the keyboard. The movie receives keyboard commands, when it has the focus (the blue border). To give the movie the focus, click on the movie or use the escape key. The keys on the keyboard mainly simulate the keyboard shortcuts of Avid: Use JKL to play, IO or ER to mark in and out, QE to go to in and out. Once marked, you can create new titles with N. You find the complete list of keys in the menu Help:Keyboard Shortcuts or in the chapter Movie of this User Guide. If you do not feel confortable with keyboard commands, you can also use the commands from the Spotting menu.
The Synchronize checkbox synchronizes the position of the movie and the titlelist. When you play the movie, you change the selection in the titlelist and you can simulate the subtitling in the Preview. When you edit in the titlelist, the movie goes always to the beginning of the selected title.
The spotting information is saved as TimeCode comments attached to the titles. You can edit these TimeCodes by hand or use the trim keyboard shortcuts to change them.
If you have already a translation, you can spot it afterwards. Use the M key or the menu Spotting:Update TimeCode:
You need sometimes to make manipulations on the spotting. There are various useful commands in the Spotting menu and in the Spotting tool in the Tools menu.
See the chapters Spotting Tool and the Menu reference for details about these commands.