The 'magical mystery' world of the Subtitling projects workflow

When looking around on the internet to find inspiration and suggestions regarding how a subtitling project can be structured, I only managed to find very confused instructions and even more confused workflows. At uni, we talked about ‘templates’, ‘corporate videos’, etc., but none of these very clear terms were mentioned in blogs online.
 
For this reason, I thought of writing down a way to provide subtitles, which is very simple and linear, at least from my point of view. First of all, to implement this workflow, you will need to know how to work with subtitling programmes, as well as, having a decent understanding of subtitling theory and practice.

1 - THE SCRIPT
The first step can be skipped if you already have a script at your disposal. However, if you don’t, which is what happens in most cases, you will need to write it down, or extract it through a programme such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is in fact very useful for many other things as it has a variety of functions.
 
2 - THE PROJECT
In any case, going back to the workflow, once you have obtained the script in a way or another, you will need to prepare a time-coded file in English (or in the source language depending on where you are based or on the language of the video that you are subtitling). You can create this file through programmes like Swift, WinCaps or Spot, in which you normally create a project (just like in a CAT tool, if this reassures you… maybe it doesn’t :) ) and then you ‘link’ the video to it. This allows you to ‘work’ on the video creating your captions, even though you are actually not working on the video as you are working on the subtitling project, which if you have WinCaps, has an extension that is called ‘. w32’. At this point, you will need to import the script (in most programmes, there will be an ‘import’ button – easy), but before that, make sure that the project settings are correct, e.g. there can be maximum two lines per caption, the reading speed is adequate for the video you are subtitling, etc.
 
3- TIME-CODING + BURN-IN
After the script added to the project, you can start timing it in; you can do this manually, or you can time it in automatically and tweak it, depending on the functions available on your subtitling programme. At this point, you will have a perfectly working subtitling file, however its format will be a bit useless as it is. In fact, in most cases, you will need to export it to more useful formats such as ‘.vtt’ or ‘.srt’; otherwise, if you are required to, you will need to ‘hardcode’ the subtitles on the video. This process is also called ‘burn-in’ and it includes ‘attaching’ the captions on the actual video in order to be able to open a single file in any media player and directly see the subtitles on the screen. This technique is not very much used anymore and makes exchanging subtitled videos very heavy and time-consuming. Also, in order to implement this additional step, you will need to use another programme, such as Adobe Premiere Pro.
 
I would suggest this workflow to people that are starting out with subtitles, or that have multilingual projects to manage. However, I will be happy to know if anybody has any good suggestions to implement in this workflow to make it faster or more efficient. Also, I would like to add that personally, if I had to subtitle and translate a video only into a language, I’d rather do it manually, doing the translation myself, as I do enjoy it very much! :)

Bye now!

Marina