[USER ACTOR] Timed Text: Text/Captions Locked to a Movie's Timecode Position.

mark

Dear All,

With Catalina, we lost the ability to use QuickTime as a playback engine, and thus the old 'text track' output that only QuickTime provides. In response to a user question about this, I've created a new User Actor called "Timed Text" that display the text/captions based on the movie's current timecode position

TIMED TEXT USER ACTOR - DESCRIPTION

Using a text file that contains a list of timecode locations and text, the Timed Text Use Actor will display the correct text based on the movie's current position. You can play the movie forwards or backwards, or even scrub it using the position input, and the Timed Text user actor will still find the correct text for the current movie timecode position.

INPUTS:

FILE PATH: File name for the text file with the timecode locations and accompanying text,

Each line this text file should be in the form:

"[HH:MM:SS:FF]"(TAB)"Text String"

where (TAB) represents the tab charactor. Both the timecode and the text must be enclosed in double-quotes so Isadora will know they should be interpreted as text.

TIMECODE: The movies current timecode position.

OUTPUTS:

The text for the current timecode position of the movie.

An example patch, which includes a correctly formatted input file with the timecode locations and text, is attached below.

Enjoy!

timed-text-user-actor.zip

mark_m

@mark

Amazing, thank you. And easy (though perhaps time consuming) to convert the standard .srt subtitle files to this format.

mark

@mark_m said:

And easy (though perhaps time consuming) to convert the standard .srt subtitle files to this format.

Well, you would have had to do that with the QuickTime text track as well.

There are a number of SRC converters out there for windows, e.g., Batch Subtitles Converter. Maybe one of the supported formats is something we could more easily get into the Data Array actor.

The data array actor requires a tab separated file. So,

item 1 <TAB> item 2 <TAB> item 3

etc. Strings must be enclosed in double quotes.

Maybe there's a format you can export to that would work with this or easily be converted, e.g., if you had an output like

00:00:00:00,Text

a search and replace could fix it.

Best Wishes,
Mark

Notdoc

@mark

thanks very much for this. I think I'm going to find it useful.

jhoepffner

@mark

Hello Mark, it would be very useful to have the possibility to use directly the widely used .srt format.

Perhaps you could try to do it?

Best, Jacques

mark

@jhoepffner said:

Perhaps you could try to do it?

After looking into this, I have already started. Should be done in a few days.

Best Wishes,
Mark

mark_m

@mark said:

After looking into this, I have already started. Should be done in a few days.

Thanks Mark, you're an absolute star.

jhoepffner

@mark

Bravo Mark, Reactive as usual

mark

Dear All and @mark_m and @jhoepffner

See this thread for the new actor that will play an SRT file.

Best Wishes,
Mark