timing srt files in isadora: introducing the captionator

timkelly

Hi all,

Bit of an odd one, I don't know if this is any use, or of any interest to anyone but I thought I'd post it here in case.

Lately, I've been doing a fair bit of captioning for streamed shows and it's been taking an age to get all the timings lined up in final cut - and I was desperate (seeing as these were all scripted) for some software that would allow me to effectively cue the show as if it was live, save those timings and spit out a proper set file. But I couldn't find anything, so I built an Isadora patch that does exactly that.

This is a *super* messy/hacky/diy patch, but it has got the job done for me, and will hopefully help some of you as well.

Any suggestions of improvements would be greatly appreciated! If you want to look behind the scenes at the patch, the password is 'captionsRfun', but please forgive me because it is *A MESS*...I'll tidy it one day.

(one specific thing that would be amazing if anyone has a better way of doing is an easy way of detecting a key combination? I've currently got something very dodgy for my reset combination that seems to occasionally not register properly, but I want it to be a combo rather than a single key as it's so destructive).

instructions:

1) prep your captions as a plaintext file called script.txt with each caption on a new line

2) copy script.txt, this showfile & your video file to a folder on your desktop

3) open the showfile, right click the video on the right and replace media with your own file, if not prompted to upon loading

4) *reset* before you do anything else (again, it doesn't reset automatically on scene load because of the small possibility of clicking off the scene and thereby deleting all your progress)

5) play, then use the spacebar to cue captions. adjust the playback speed as desired.

6) press f to flag timestamps of any sections you need to edit later on in your video editing application. (unfortunately, you cannot currently go back and edit within captionator itself). captionator is designed as a tool to save time in creating a 'first draft' set of timings, rather than to be a complete captioning solution.

7) press p to play / pause if you need a break. the file will save as you go.

8) if you're captioning a long video, it's probably worth pausing taking a backup of result.srt every now and again.

9) import result.srt (which will have been created on your desktop) to a video editing program to make any necessary tweaks or edits to the captions.
you can find timestamps of sections you flagged in flags.tsv (which will have also been created on your desktop)

CAPTIONATORV2.izz

timkelly

@timkelly I'm going to make some video documentation for it at some point as well, as it's a bit of a faff to set up

soap.er

@timkelly

hey tim

hi there...

I was testing your patch... (app) it actually loads a video asking for source from the beginning but i didn't find the way to add the script, it didn't ask for it...

Isrohan

Woland

@timkelly

Feel free to upload this to the TroikaTronix Add-Ons page (link in my signature). Eventually new forum posts push old forum posts down in the pile, so super-useful creations like yours here get buried here, but the Add-Ons page preserves all these useful tools and makes them easier for the community to access :)

Best wishes,

Woland

timkelly

@soap-er hiya - you don't need to load the script, just save your script as script.txt in the same directory the izzy file is saved in and it should read it automatically :)

@woland will do, once I've managed to write up /record some better documentation for it I can link to :)

Woland

Just in case other folks run across this post in future and are looking to work with surtitles/subtitles/supertitles without glypheo, it's worth noting that we've released the SRT Subtitle Player downloadable plugin on the TroikaTronix Add-Ons Page for use with .srt files.

Additionally, the Read Text From File downloadable plugin we have recently released on the TroikaTronix Add-Ons Page might also be useful for the purposes of reading surtitles/subitles/supertitles from a file and feeding that text into a Text Draw actor, then out through a Projector actor.