Notes / Tips

(This page used to be hosted at a friend's site, called LunaArts. That's the site name, not my friend's name :-)

Here you'll find tips for subtitling with RealText. More will be added as we go along, and if you know something that can help others in the task of subtitling, don't hesitate to tell us your tips! We will include them in this page.

We have just created this section, so it has only a couple of tips. :-)

How am I supposed to know the dimensions of the video?

Good question!

I still haven't found an easy way to do that... so, I wrote a program to show this information. It's shamelesly simple at this time, but it worked on all RealVideo files I tested (about a hundred). If you want to, give it a try: Info_RM.zip (about 7kb).

Controlling the video playback with the keyboard

When you are making the timing, sometimes you need to advance the video or go backwards. Using the mouse with the RealPlayer can be very slow, so the keyboard is a better option when this happens:

key combination what it does
[Ctrl]+[Left arrow] rewind
[Ctrl]+[Right arrow] forward
[Ctrl]+[Shift]+[Left arrow] rewind (faster)
[Ctrl]+[Shift]+[Right arrow] forward (faster)
[Ctrl]+[P] play/pause

Timing tip

You can get the time of the start or the end of the lines by pausing/playing/pausing the video, until you reach the correct time. If you want to go back some frames, use the keyboard.

Using an audio editor for timing

If you have the audio in Wave format, or can load your audio in an audio editor, you can "see" the lines and make a perfect timing in less time. But for this, you must have already translated the text, and it may not be a good option if your video already have subtitling on it.

Notes on Starting your Project

Just some things to think about:
- You might want to include a read me with your credits and notes. Things you might want to include is how to play the file, who worked on it, and your experience subtitling the project(I'm sure everybody will be interested ^_^). Name the readme text file the same as your *.smi file but in *.txt format.
- Update us at least weekly on what's going on so we can add it to the comments section in the Ongoing Projects area.
- Be sure to visit the tutorial on Realtext.
- If you use someone else's timing or translation, please give them the credit they deserve. :)
- Zip your *.rt and *.smi files before sending them to this site.

Subtitling program for Windows

Do you think that "raw" RealText is too hard to use? You want a program to help you out in most of the subtitling process? A lot of fansubers use the Sub Station Alpha software to create their subtitles. One of it's best features: it's free! :-)

Later we will discuss how to convert its files to RealText.

Subtitling tutorial

If you don't have a clue of how to start to subtitle, take a look at The Beginners Guide to Subtitling. It's intended for general purpose subtitling, but almos everything there can also be applied to RealText.