Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Adding Closed Captions to a DVD

There's a few steps and it's not super easy, but it's also not
that difficult...

BTW, this is meant to be a solution to adding closed captions to your own created DVD as opposed to an existing movie or something. I just had a hard time finding out how to do this so I wanted to make sure I made notes.

You'll need a few tools:


The short explination is this:


  1. Use SubCreator to create subtitles for your project (output: text file(s))
  2. Use subrip2scc.exe (SCC tool) to convert to .scc file.
  3. Use Adobe Encore to load project and add .scc file above.
  4. Render and burn.


The long explination is this:



1. Still basically the same. Nothing too big or complicated. Load your .avi (or whatever) into SubCreator, load your script into the lower screen, hit CTRL+A on each line as it sd appear while previewing the video.

Use the 'export' feature to convert the subtitles to .srt format (click the srt option in the list and click convert) and save to a file.

2. Open a dos prompt and run subrip2scc.exe w/ the -u parameter and feed it the .srt file (run subrip2scc.exe alone to see the options).

3. Open Adobe Encore and creat your project like you'd expect. Here's a step-by-step:


  1. Drag the avi into Encore.
  2. Right click and create a timeline.
  3. In the timeline panel, click (or double-click) on the video.
  4. The properties panel sd appear for the video.
  5. On the lower part, there is options for 'field 1' and 'field 2'.
  6. Click 'browse' by 'field 1' and select your .scc file created above.


4. Hit F2, check the project and burn (you may need a menu and some other
settings, but if it finds problems usually you can click on the problem and
it bring up the offender).

Bonus: You can use the subtitles you created in SubCreator in Encore. However,
I needed to change the format of the file slightly:

From this:
00:00:16.3:Everytime I try to do something to tell people

To this:
00;00;16;3 00;00;18;7 Everytime I try to do something to tell people

(colon and dot in times to semi-colons, remove colon after time and add
an end time).

I just created a macro in TextPad to do this using the start time of the
next line as the end time of the current line. Then in Adobe, on the timeline,
you can right-click and select 'import subtitles' w/ the text file option.

I hope this helps someone - I certainly wish this were available when I
was trying to figure it out! :)

4 comments:

BMan said...

I ran into an error when trying to create the DVD folder in Encore DVD: "Parameter is invalid"

I changed the first timing line in the scc file from:
00:00:00:00
to
00:00:00:02

I saw the ...02 line in another file and thought maybe that wd help and... praise God! It did!

Wow, talk about hard to fine.

BMan said...

A couple more things I learned...

1. My captions were very flashy/blinky on the screen. I burned to a better (Maxell) DVD and they worked fine.

2. When you add chapters (other avi's) to a timeline, you sd select each timeline to add scc files to. Otherwise, each chapter gets the same scc file. In my case, that meant that the second part of the video had the same scc data so the captions started over from the begining. You can select the individual chapters by clicking on them or using the left/right arrow on the 'video' part of the timeline. In my case, I really just needed to add credits at the end so I just removed scc data from that chapter.

Also, I'll probably add either playlists and/or override settings on the timelines so that I can have a 'play all' button and the individual buttons will just play that title (the override setting will go back to the menu when done playing).

Bob said...

Great stuff. How do I download the SUBRIP2SCC.exe file? Also, the first tool no longer exist...are there others?

BMan said...

I updated the links for the new location of subcreator and a direct download link for the scc tools which contains subrip2scc.exe.

Thanks!