DotSub woes - Switching to Jubler or Subtitle workshop temporarily
(thread in Post-Production forum)by David Evan Harris on 2007-11-15 21:08:30
(DotSub woes - Switching to Jubler or Subtitle workshop temporarily)
Unfortunately, we learned the hard way in Brazil that DotSub.com, the brilliant online subtitling tool, has serious bugs that make it difficult to title videos longer than 20 minutes in length. DotSub's developers tell us that the new version will be ready in January, at which point we'll be able to upload titles from Jubler into their software and view them online. But in the meantime, we need to find a solution so that we can keep the volunteers that we've already lined up working and get the videos from Brazil, Japan and Malawi subtitled ASAP.
The present strategy is to attempt to use the open-source offline subtitling program called Jubler, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Unfortunately, it is not quite as user-friendly as DotSub. Shannon in Connecticut and Irene in Japan may be testing it out in the coming weeks, so please share experiences here. I am overloaded with other tasks at the moment and won't be able to put time into this until December, but I wanted to put this up here on the forum so that everyone can discuss openly the best solutions.
To get the video chunks out to volunteers will be through our ftp site, follow FTP upload instructions, and then just send volunteers a link to the file you want them to download. They can download with a web browser by right-clicking (ctrl-click on mac) on the links and clicking "save as."
There is a Jubler manual online that may be useful, though ultimately, I think we will need to write our own simplified manual for our volunteers and then translate it as necessary. Working as a team, I think we should be able to figure this out!
Cheers,
David
by Anonymous on 2007-11-20 16:29:38
(Looking forward to your feedback)
Hi David,
I look forward to hearing all about your experience using Jubler and what you've learned about the offline captioning process in general so we make dotSUB 2.0 even better.
Peder
by David Evan Harris on 2008-09-04 06:30:47
(Dotsub 2.0 online, many problems solved)
Good news is that DotSub is now in version 2.0 and many of these issues have been resolved. Thanks much to Peder, Thor, Michael and Ed for their attentive responses to our requests and for all their hard work! Also thanks to Jason Price for working with them!
Unfortunately, we've still got a few key problems with dotsub that need to be resolved:
1) Dotsub "import subtitles" feature does not seem to work, though it is an option in 2.0.
2) Once a transcript is marked as complete on dotsub, you have to email one of their administraters in order to unlock it if you want to edit timecodes or add a line to the transcript. This should be a simple feature that the owner of any video should be able to do.
Also, sadly, still most internet connections in Malawi are not fast enough for dotsub to be workable. That is a large part of why #1 above is a big problem.
On another note, every volunteer who I asked to try to use Jubler found it confusing and complicated. Ug. I did hear recently though about another Overstream.net, though I have not yet had a chance to test it out.
As it stands, DotSub seems to be by far the best solution for distributed subtitling online and for Global Lives' needs. Kudos to their team!