Thursday, September 17, 2009

Subtitling issues using stl files and DVD Studio Pro

We are working on a film project and are now in the process of doing the DVD authoring in DVD Studio Pro 4. There are a lot of subtitles so we decided to create an stl file using a spreadsheet. The structure is as follows:

Column 1: Start time <00:00:00:00>
Column 2: comma <,>
Column 3: End time <00:00:00:00>
Column 4: comma <,>
Column 5: Subtitle text

Once we are done with the file we copy and paste it into notepad and then save it as as .stl file using UTF-8 encoding.

Things generally have worked well with this process aside from one quite significant issue: If the subtitle starts with certain special characters -- in English this includes a quotation mark -- the character does not import into DVD Studio Pro -- it just disappears. In the case of Persian, the first character of every subtitle -- no matter what it was -- would not be imported.

Fortunately the fix is simple. Just make sure to add a space at the beginning of a subtitle that starts with an offending character. This seems to fool the importer into allowing the character to import.

2 comments:

PACIFISTAS MEDIA PROJECT said...

Hello. I found your post on subtitling using a spreadsheet and then notepad quite useful. However I haven't been able to save the text file as .stl. Could you give me a hand with it? Thanks. Carlos.

Brian said...

Hi Carlos,

Notepad will always add a .txt extension to a text file unless you surround the whole file name in quotes. So if the file name you want is myfile.stl, save it as "myfile.stl". You can also change an already created one by just right clicking the file and select "rename" -- ad then just change it to myfile.stl

Also make sure to save it in UTF-8 encoding or some special characters might be lost.

I hope this answers your question. If not, repost with more details.