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Have you ever wondered if there was an easier way to time your subtitles? Dragging and splicing and playing your video again and again in video editors can get tiring! This tutorial will show you how with free software! You can watch the video version of this tutorial here:
Create Your Own Subtitles: Aegisub
We will be using a free subtitle editor called Aegisub. If you haven’t heard of or have never used it before, don’t worry, I will go through the basics here. Compared to Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, this is a very lightweight application if you’re just creating subtitles. It uses about 70% less electricity than the video editors or NLE. Go green! If you don’t have Aegisub yet, download it here: https://aegisub.org/.
For this tutorial, we only need to look at the Video section, the Subtitle Grid, and the Subtitle Edit Box. Let’s open a video in Aegisub. Get and copy your script, click on a row in the Subtitle Grid, and paste. If what you have is a blob of text, you’ll have to separate them with line breaks. You can also skip Aegisub and use YouTube’s Subtitle feature and just let it work the magic of timing it. Kthxbye!
Aegisub Basics
To start, press Ctrl+P to play the video, and when you hear the line, press Ctrl+3 to set the start of the subtitle to this current frame. At the end of the spoken line, press Ctrl+4 to set the end of it. Don’t worry about the points being “late” or that you’re not hitting the hotkeys before the line is spoken. We’ll take of that later. Also, if you need to split a line of text, go to the Subtitle Edit Box, put your cursor where you want the split, right-click, select “Split at cursor”. The 3 different types are going to matter only if you’ve already set the time. For now, any of these will do.
A lot of spoken lines usually have the start of the next line right at the end of the current line. So, if you’re “keying” your subtitles while your video is playing, it’s really difficult to press Ctrl+4 right after Ctrl+3. So here’s a quick tip. Play the video, then everytime you hear a line, press Ctrl+3 then Enter to go to the next line. Do this for the next 5 lines or so. You can also use the Down Arrow key but I personally go for the Enter key because it’s bigger – less mistakes.
Now, what about the end of the subtitle line? After about 5 lines, you can check your subtitles by double-clicking your first line to go back to it. Play the video. You won’t see any output since the subtitles have no endpoints. So, what we do is select these 5 lines, right-click, then select “Make times continuous (change end)”. This will automatically set the endpoints of each of the selected lines to the start of the line next to them. Note that the endpoint of the last line won’t get updated because it doesn’t know where the next line is. Play the video back again and the subtitles will appear now.
You can press the Up and Down arrow keys on the Subtitle Grid to go to the previous and next lines respectively. You can use the Right and Left arrow keys to go to the next or previous frames to make adjustments to the accuracy of the start and endpoints and press Ctrl+3 or Ctrl+4 to set your changes. If you’re gonna use the arrow keys for this purpose, make sure than you’re on the Subtitle Grid because these keys have different functions in the different sections of the software. Also, Ctrl+1 sends you back to the time of the subtitle’s starting point. If you don’t need exact frame or millisecond timings on your subtitles, then you’re all good!
But if you do, we’ll discuss it in the later portions of the video. Now, here’s how it will look like once you get the hang of it. Play the video, Ctrl+3 everytime you hear the line, press Enter, and repeat this for every line. Once you’re done, select all the lines of text, right-click, set the endpoints by selecting “Make times continuous”.
Changing End Times of the Lines
Remember when I said not to worry about “late” timings some 4,000,000 words ago? Select all your lines, go to “Timing” then select “Shift Times…” or just press Ctrl+I. You can set how long you want everything to go back by putting something in time; let’s say 200ms which will be equivalent to 0:00:00.20. You don’t need to select the numbers and delete them. Just type away! Try to be as consistent as possible to minimize the variance of this 200ms number. Make sure that you select “Backward” since we’re fixing late timings.
In the “Affect” section, we’ll choose “Selected rows”. If you’re confident about committing this change to your whole file, you can select “All rows”. And I hope “Selection onward” is self-explanatory. For this example, we’ll select “Start and End times” but you can experiment with this and see what they do. This action is undoable as one whole action so it’s easy to shift time, undo, try another time shift, undo, and so on.
So, as a review, this is what I usually do. Play the video, Ctrl+3 when I hear a line, Enter, Ctrl+3 again, Enter, Ctrl+3, Enter, Ctrl+3, Enter, Ctrl+3, Enter. Select the lines, right-click, “Make times continuous”, Ctrl+I, set the shift distance, set it to Backward. Done! You can save the file as its default filetype called ASS or Advanced Substation Alpha (whatever that means) or, to save it as the popular SRT format, go to “Export Subtitles”, leave everything as default, click “Export”, set the filename, Save, done! I would advise saving your file as an ASS file if you’re not yet done and only export as SRT when you’re done.
Anyway, the difference between these two is that styles are retained in ASS files. Styles? Yeah, styles like these which are usually seen in anime music videos! Speaking of which, I have a few in my now dead Karaoke Dojo channel if you wanna see some samples. Every one of those videos are, of course, copyright claimed, so yeah.
Feel free to check out my other tutorials on OBS, streaming, Twitch redeems, overlays, and so on https://sidestreamnetwork.net/tutorials ! If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments, or in my Discord, or anywhere you know how to reach me!
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