Captions or subtitles? And how?

Kalvos wrote on 12/13/2011, 5:33 PM

Hi all,

I have used .srt files for captioning videos played on a computer.

I need captions for a DVD, and am not finding a way to do that.

What I've found is a converter for .srt to DVDA caption file, but no way to import that into DVDA.

And by "captions", I mean user-selectable on/off captions for a video of my opera. The behave like CC on YouTube. Here's what I mean:

I have DVDA Studio. I've read in one place that it doesn't support captioning and that's only in DVDA Pro. But the DVDA Studio product page does mention captioning. Plus, I don't find DVDA Pro in Sony's product list. Does it exist? How to I buy or upgrade to it?

Okay, that said. How ARE captions of the kind I described placed on the DVD? Do I have to re-render the video somehow (please say no! It's 70 minutes long and each render takes 10 hours).

Please help get me started.

Thanks,
Dennis

Comments

TOG62 wrote on 12/14/2011, 1:39 AM

I use DVDAS and there is, so far as I know, no captioning capability. You do need the pro version and, to get that you have to buy Vegas Pro. I think it's crazy, but that's how it is.

Kalvos wrote on 12/14/2011, 5:55 AM

Really? So that's where the Pro version lives! Odd that they sell DVDA Studio separately, but not Pro.

The Vegas method is kind of out because I have VMS 11 and upgrading to Vegas 11 requires Windows Vista/7. I use XP on all my machines. I do see one company offering Vegas 10 (academic, and I qualify) -- but I've gone that route before and what actually ended up in my mailbox was the latest version, not the one that was advertised.

A few hours ago I found & installed a freeware captioner (Subtitle Creator) that should do the trick. It's got an adequate interface and it uses a lot of the free software that I already have installed.

Thanks for your help,
Dennis