Belle Nuit Subtitler creates TIFF files, which are edited in the Final Cut Pro (FCP) as graphics which are realtime on some FCP systems. You can export the spotting from Subtitler to FCP via an EDL or via XML (FCP 4.1 or later). Note: If you experience problems with crashing Final Cut Pro 5 while importing or updating XML files, try using the EDL CMX3600 export instead.
Depending on your subtitling workflow, there are various methods to make work FCP and Subtitler together:
This document also discusses some special cases:Note: By default, titles are numbered on a "0000.tif" format. You will be safer, however, if you name the titles in Subtitler explicitely with the /file tag. This will allow you to add additional titles in corrections without creating a confusion on the filenames.
The spotting and the translation is provided as a file by an external service bureau.
Subtitling is an interactive process which has often several steps of reviewing and corrections. Keep the Subtitler document open while editing in the FCP. If you need to make a correction:
If you make also corrections on the spotting. You can update the changes you made in Final Cut Pro:
Once you have created one language version, you can recreate other language versions without much work.
Note: Keep in mind that other languages can have titles which are as much as 50% longer than the same title in English. You have three solutions: Summarize more strongly with some creativity, have a slightly smaller fonts or have two lines instead of one. Making more titles would not be an option, because you would exceed the attention a public can give to subtitles.
Depending on your hardware configuration, you may or may not need to render your titles. But even in a realtime system, the number of titles can go beyond the limit of Final Cut Pro. If you have a lot of titles, some may not want to play. Increase cache or render some of the titles.
Users have reported problems importing EDLs from Subtitler. These EDLs have timecodes of 10:00:00:00 and more. Also, we got reports with XML files from sequences with a duration of more than 10 hours.
Tests with FCP3 and FCP4 show us that Final Cut Pro cannot deal with very long sequences. The limit seems to be somewhere between 10 and 11 hours. EDL with late timecodes fall in these problem, because on import, the sequences is created first with a start of zero hours.
There is no workaround. You should not use timecode values of more than 10:00:00:00 if you intend to import into Final Cut Pro.
If the timecode comments, are already created, then you can select all titles and offset them with the menu Spotting:Offset Timecode. If you have 1000 subtitles, this command will take some time.
Note: If you experience problems with crashing Final Cut Pro 5 while importing or updating XML files, try using the EDL CMX3600 export instead.
It may happen that the subtitles have already been created in Final Cut Pro using the Text effect. We do not recommend this procedure, as this is quite a dead end, eg. the subtitles are not reusable for other purposes and very difficult to edit.
However, there might be a possibility to recover the titles. Create a sequence which contains only the subtitle track. Export it as XML and use the Import tool in Subtitler to import it as Final Cut Pro Text Effect XML. The importer will try to recover the text part of the text effect.
If you have continuous titles with no frames between them, you will not be able to export the titlelist successfully to Final Cut Pro 3.0 and 4.0. The reason is a bug in FCP handling of the CMX EDL. When the outpoint of one title is the inpoint of the next, the FCP EDL importer considers the second title as overlapping and discards it on the import.
You do not have this problem if you export through Final Cut Pro XML. The XML importer in FCP reads the sequence properly. But you need at least FCP 4.1. for that.
The formatting of the comments of the imported and exported EDLs are not the same for all versions of Final Cut Pro. While the english version of Final Cut Pro uses "FROM CLIP NAME:" to define the name of the clip (which is pretty standard), the french version uses "DU NOM DE CLIP :". Belle Nuit Subtitler exports with the english text and expects an english text on import. If you use the EDLs with a french version of Final Cut Pro, you must replace the texts with a text editor.