Some more news for 10.1 (subtitles)

As mentioned by others the XML format is updated us well.

This seems not be that important to most of the people but for minor group like mine this was the best thing at all.

Im working with subtitles or for subtitlers or for edittors in a collaborative environment
Prior versions of X only allowed basic text exchange.

10.1 allows a complex style based exchange of Motion based subtitles and titles.

This is already visible in the UI. Motion text titles always had been RTF based, but not with the full feature set. This has drastically improved now.

There are two kinds of Motion text titles. Some use a text region for text entries others just a simple text entry.

Both behave different.

For the simple entry example the "Basic Title"
You can select parts of the text and apply a different font, style, color, size etc.





For these kind of titles alignment changes either don't work or make no sense cause of their center.


Text region based (sub)titles behave a bit different.
Once you select the text in the canvas the text region will be visible and you can do the same things as above.



Once you are done the behaviour in Inspector will change a bit.





With this kind of title you now can use the alignment settings cause it has a kind of bounding box.




You even can go further and click the little ruler icon in the upper right of the canvas and setup tabs.
To make tabs work as expected the text (the line) must be left aligned.



BUT there is one thing you should keep in mind: There is no way back to the original settings of the title with a simple reset of all parameters!!!!!!!!

So what's the reason to be happy for me?

Finally it's possible to interchange subtitles with co-workers who work with other apps and still keep the settings with an XML roundtrip.
I can create XMLs which do match the settings given by subtitle company and don't have to modify thousands of subtitles in the timeline.
Another thing (which worked beautifully in FCP) is that it is now possible to create a .tiff subtitle image sequence (each subtitle 1 frame) together with EDL or something like this which can be used in other apps and every app will have exactly the same subtitle appearance.

I will update my X-Title apps early next year. So others will be able to use these new features.

-Andreas

Hi Andreas,

Good find! Thanks for sharing. When I have to do subtitling I am still using BelleNuit, but this workflow still requires me to use FCP7 once in a while to add the subtitles to the videofile.
Would love to do it all in FCPX.

Robbert-Jan

Very good news Andreas, thanks for all your work.

To follow up my own post.

In former times you needed a Motion title for each font style to get a "half-baken" import from external subtitle files. This still didn't include alignment nor any custom font settings.
For the alignment you needed three times the amount of these title effects – again still no font settings and only one style per subtitle.





The new handling reduces the needed subtitle effects to 2 or finally 1. So clutter will be less.
This makes not only handling easier but also editing speed because FCPX have to load less templates.

Another note: If you have ideas or wishes how a subtitle importer/exporter for FCPX should work let me know.

-Andreas

Hey Andreas,

Thank you for this interesting heads-up and I'm glad Apple seems to have been listening to you as well

Although this does not apply to every editor, subtitling is really very important. Thank you for all the hard work you are doing in this specific niche of our industry and keep us posted on your progress.

- Ronny

Great Andreas!

I do a lot of bad formated Chinese subtitles to place in videos. I will try this next year. Thanks!

Hi James,

First thing (because its the easiest) I will do is to write a little app which will create two XMLs from 1 XML with subtitles.
The first one will will be a new timeline where each (sub)title has a duration of 1 frame – all frames don't have any gaps in between.
The second one will have the original timing but all title effects will be replaced by a video entry with a dummy source path.

The first one can be opened in FCP 10.1 and exported as Image Sequence - the codec must be set to Prores 4444 and for saving a lot of disk space the output should be png.
Once finished you can relink the dummies in the second XML with the rendered images.

This second timeline has the advantage that no render is needed for the titles.



The disadvantage is that you can't edit the text anymore directly. You have to go to the "single frame generator" timeline, edit the text there and export this frame.

Andreas

Cool Andreas! I will give it a try!

I've always had to do the translation while viewing the video!
Never used SRT in FCPX... I know...crazy...

Ha!

This style stuff doesn't seem to work reliable - I haven't tried all title effects, but there were some oddities.

Here some examples with just 2 title effects (my TextUp and the built in Basic Title) where the Basic Title is buggy

Here how it looks in the timeline.

TextUp



Basic Title



Here how it looks after exporting the timeline.

TextUp



Basic Title



Andreas

I made a post for the first app.

www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/...style-features#37656

-Andreas