Multilingual video and subtitles

[sojevsky]

Hi there,

I want to edit a short video in French and in German, and add 4 subtitles (french, german, english, portuguese). I'd like to have a final export that I can put on youtube (.mp4 ideally) in one video (no hard sub, choose your language/sub). I have the Adobe suite. I know you can do soft subs with Encore, but I understood it's gonna be a dvd/bluray.

How can I do that ? Thanks already.

SK

[Mike Dziennik]

You can create subtitles in Premiere using Open Captions and then export them as srt. You should be able to upload the srt in YouTube Studio.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734796?hl=en-GB 

[sojevsky]

Hi Mike, 

Thanks for answering.

Ok, yeah, that seems like a good solution for the subtitles. 

Do you have any solution for selecting langages (French/German) on the video itself ?

Thanks

[Michael Grenadier]

it should be built in to the youtube interface

[Mike Dziennik]

Yes, you will need to create seperate captions exports for each language and choose the language when you upload them to Youtube. As @Michael Grenadier says: you will choose the language in the Youtube interface.

[sojevsky]

I see, so I'll try that. Thanks a lot ! 

[Warren Heaton]

One of the challenges of working with subtitles is that there's no one approach for every possible publishing method.

What you do for DVD-Video is different than what you do YouTube video which is different than what you do for QuickTime Movie files playing in QuickTime Player which is different than what you do for video playing in VLC Player.

Furthermore, captions and subtitles are not the same things (won't get into that here).

While Premiere Pro can help you to create your captions/subtitles, it may or may not help in embedding them or linking them later.

As mentioned in other posts, for YouTube you need your caption file to be a SRT file or SubRip file that accompanies your movie file when you upload it.  So, there's your movie file (filename.mp4) and your SRT files (filename_fr.srt with the French, filename_de.srt with the German, filename_en.srt with the English, and filename_pt.srt with the Portuguese).

For a QuickTime Movie file, you can add captions or subtitles to a movie using QuickTime Player; however, it's a custom text format that includes the timestamps and captions text.  Once added and saved, this appends the text track into the movie file the user can select the language in QuickTime Player from the View pulldown menu while playing the file.

If you haven't already considered it, I'd use rev.com for your transcription.  It's very affordable and you can download the captions/subtitles in just about any of the many file formats that might be needed depending on where you're publishing your video.

Another helpful reference is https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php. Here you can find the standard two-letter code for each language that you might include with your video.

[sojevsky]

Hey Warren, 

I think I really know where I'm heading now, thanks to your detailled answer.

Thanks for the sites. I may use rev.com, seems very useful.

First times are always a challenge, so far I'm doing ok.

Thanks !