Subs within synced clips for editing foreign language (documentary)

Hi there,

I am a dutch editor working mostly in Avid MC (and sometimes Premiere), who wants to try and make the jump to FCP.
For a new documentary film I was curious how people go about editing foreign languages in FCP.

All the source footage will be translated and subbed, so I will need to be able to see the subs on the source material, not only in the timeline.
In Avid I am used to having a string-out sequence per shooting day with al the subs on top, but to be able to use the strong organizational capabilities in FCP, I would prefer to have the subs within the synced clips so I can go through them in the browser.

Does anybody knows if this is possible, and if not: any other workflow tips are more than welcome!

Kind regards,
Erik

Erik, you've identified a major flaw in FCP's support for captions or caption metadata when dealing with source media in the Browser. It's unfortunate that Apple can't lead the way in this regard, especially considering the tech they have behind things such as Siri. Even a low-end NLE like CapCut for macOS can do "in-line" captioning on imported clips.

That said, there are some workarounds available. Here are some:

1. You could import clips with burned-in captions and edit with them. Later on, you could substitute used clips with versions without burned-in captions, then deal with captioning in the timeline/Project.

2. A tool like KeyFlow Pro will let you do a lot of organizing work that you'd normally do in FCP, and then let you transfer that to FCP. You can keyword and subclip files, as well as add subtitles/captions/transcript text to clip ranges and transfer that info to FCP. Kyno can also do similar tasks.
keyflowpro.com/
lesspain.software/kyno/features/

3. Subvert can take caption files and help get the caption text into FCP.
www.subvertapp.com

4. Another tool, Lumberjack Builder, can also help get caption text/metadata into FCP. But, Builder is even more powerful, in that you can use it to tag clips, organize things, and do "text edits" with your source media, the results of which are transfered back to FCP for final editing.
www.lumberjacksystem.com/builder-nle-2/

---

It would be super cool if Apple would add transcript/caption text/metadata as a first-class media type to FCP. Something like adding another angle to a multicam clip, or to a synch clip, but for text, would be awesome. Also, it would be nice if there was a built-in speech recognition feature (like CapCut has) so there wouldn't necessarily be a need (an option would be nice) for importing text/caption info.

Hope this helps...

Here's a workflow I used recently for a bunch of interviews. I wanted to have interview transcriptions visible and also be searchable, and I wanted it in the multicam so any logging or keywording would be applied to it.

Sonix.ai did pretty good job of transcribing the interviews. They can also export as SRT files which are caption files, typically done at the end when a project is done. There's a great guy, Andreas Kiel, aka Spherico, who has FCP utilities at www.spherico.com/filmtools/index.html I used X-Title Importer to convert the SRTs into fcpxml projects of titles that I then imported into FCP. I set these titles to a new Transcription role.

I stepped into the A cam compound of the multicam and added the titles. The title name is the line of transcription so they are searchable. But this is stepped into the multicam and when you step back out to the parent level, the titles aren't available. So, I added a dummy angle in the multicam and pasted the titles there too. Turned off their visibility since I don't need them as an actual angle, just to be able to search them.

So now one can do a text search in the multicam Index and then click a title to take you to that spot in the interview. I also made the title font pretty big so you can also just scrub through the video in the browser and speed read to get your bearings.

Thanks DaveM and TerryB for all the detailed info

@ DaveM
"It would be super cool if Apple would add transcript/caption text/metadata as a first-class media type to FCP. Something like adding another angle to a multicam clip, or to a synch clip, but for text, would be awesome"
Exactly that would be really nice to see.

@ TerryB
Thanks a lot, this was the workaround solution I was looking for.
Also ideal that the text is still searchable via X-Title in combination with a dummy angle inside the multicam

Erik, I'm happy it was useful. One thing I noticed with long interviews and several hundred captions in each was the library started feeling heavy. On the next one I might try creating a flattened version of the captions keyed over the A cam in the multicam for visual search, but still using the captions as a dummy angle for text search. I'm thinking not having 2 copies of hundreds of captions for each multicam and many of these mutlcams in a project might help things feel a little snappier.

Ah yes, hopefully this will keep the size down a bit. Good thinking though!