Live Subtitling Software

[Jonathan Greer]

Hello all,

Our cinema quite often screens films which have to be live subtitled as no subtitled print or DCP is available. We're looking at what software is available to do this and have found the packages Qstit and Subtivals. One of my colleagues has used EasySubtitler in the past but it appears this may now be defunct. Just wondering if anyone has any experience of these packages, or knows of another we've overlooked.
In particular, how stable are they (in comparison to Powerpoint which has a propensity to crash when given hundreds of slides)?

Thanks

[Carsten Kurz]

What are common ways to sync title playout? There are some few servers that can output timecode, but, for a universal solution, that capability is rare.

Would you expect automatic sync, Jonathan? You are talking about 16 or 35mm, right? There are a few solutions to sync subtitle playout with the projector motor/gear.

- Carsten

[Harold Hallikainen]

I've recently added live captions to the QSC IRC-28C system. Captions are delivered to the CCR-100 and CCH-100 IR receivers. Captions are entered on a web page and transmitted when [enter] is hit or you go over 32 characters in a line (it then word wraps). Dragon Naturally Speaking also works with it by filling in the web page textarea. I'm going to add a timeout so stuff gets transmitted if there's a pause.

I'll soon be starting work on interface to an EEG HD492 that will feed speech to text or manually created captions to the IRC-28C.

Harold

[Elia Orselli]

During Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna Sub-ti uses it's proprietary software for subtitle projection. It's similar to Qstit and Subtival: it allows the technician to play a pre-synced subtitle file or to manually trigger each line.
I would also consider the possibility to create a VF with subtitles using DOM (obviously if you are working with unencrypted DCPs).

[Sean McKinnon]

Harold,

Is this something that is, or is going to be publicly available?

[Harold Hallikainen]

Yes, it will be available as a firmware update. A preliminary version is at http://ftp.uslinc.com/Products/IRC-2...Firmware/beta/ . I will be posting another update this week that handles very large caption files. Right now, caption files are limited to about 400 kB. Most movies have captions broken into reels with each being about 100 kB. But now and then there's one where they put the whole movie in one reel.

Harold

[Scott Norwood]

I did a screening recently for someone who was using Subtival. It worked fine. I was just the projectionist, though. The subtitle person was a native speaker of the film's language, so it worked fine. The feature was on 35mm and we used a D-cinema projector and laptop for the subtitles. Apparently, this venue does this regularly, with few problems.

[Jonathan Greer]

Thanks for the feed back. We had a live subtitled screening on Friday and tried out Qstit which worked well. It was for an encrypted DCP of a French film without subs (and the distributor wouldn't give us a D-KDM). I made an srt by extracting the subs from a DVD of the film and adjusting the timing - didn't have enough of a window while the KDM was open to do this exactly, but close enough that we could set it going, then the film curator who programmed the film (and speaks French) was able to correct the subs if they drifted out of sync - Qstit worked nicely for switching between auto and manual.