To load a subtitle file click the “File/Load Subtitle” menu of Subtitle Workshop or press [Ctrl]+[O] keys. Additionally, you can drop your file into the main window, or if the extensions are associated, just double click on the subtitle file you wish to open.

If you get the “The file is a bad subtitle or an unsupported format” error message, there is still some chance you can load the file. First of all you MUST be sure about the format of the file, if you are, then proceed like this:

1. Click the “File/Load subtitle” menu.
2. A dialog will pop up, you have to select the right filter in it (there is a combo box where you see the “All supported files” text, you have to click the button with the arrow that is next to it and select the format of the file).
3. Once you have done this, press the Open button in the dialog.

This way there will be no automatic format recognition nor file check

To load a video file click the “Movie/Open” menu or press the [Ctrl]+[P] keys. If you get the “File is not a valid video file” error message, make sure you have the right codecs installed. If you don’t, download Coda Codec Pack, it should fix most of the playback problems.

Using Subtitle Workshop you can create new files from scratch, and then save them in any format. To do so, click the “File/New subtitle…” menu or press [Ctrl]+[N] keys. Once you have done this, you can start adding subtitles, and then save the file by the “File/Save” menu or pressing [Ctrl]+[S] keys.

Cf. How to split your subtitles file with Subtitle Workshop

Adding subtitles

You need to press the Insert key or click the “Edit/Insert subtitle” menu. The subtitle will always be added right after the focused item. The default duration of the new subtitle is one second, and the start time of it is always going to be the final time of the previous one plus 1 millisecond. If you are adding the subtitle in a blank list, the initial time of it will be zero.

If you want to insert a subtitle before the selected item, press [Shift]+[Insert] keys or the “Edit/Insert before” menu.

Deleting subtitles

Select all the subtitles you wish to delete by holding Ctrl key and click in them and press the Delete key or click the “Edit/Remove selected” menu.

Manually edit a subtitle

Each subtitle is composed in three parts:

1. The initial time – the time in which the subtitle is shown.
2. The final time – the time in which the subtitle is hidden.
3. The text – the subtitle itself.

Subtitle Workshop lets you edit any of these fields.

To edit the initial time click the “Show” field, set the time (or frames) you wish and press [Enter].
To edit the final time click the “Hide” field, set the time (or frames) you wish and press [Enter]. Note that you can also edit the final time of a subtitle by changing the “Duration” field.
You can also edit any of these time values using the Up-Down buttons at the right side of each text box.

To edit the text, simply click the “Text” box and write the desired text. In the list of subtitles, the character “|” (pipe) represents new line.

Style and color tags

Subtitle Workshop only supports tags for the whole subtitle. So if you really want to apply a font style over some part of the subtitle, you need notepad. As it only supports tags for the whole subtitle, you only need to open the tags, closing them is unnecessary. The supported tags are:

* <b> for bold
* <i> for italic
* <u> for underline
* <c:#RRGGBB> for color, the format of the color is HTML format

To add tags you can write them, or right-click on the list of subtitles to open a menu; you can use this menu to control all the tags on the selected subtitles. Note that more than one tag can be used in the same subtitle, it may have the 4 supported tags at the same time.

Not all subtitle formats support style tags or color tags. If you save these tags in a subtitle format which doesn’t support them, the tags will be lost.

FPS and Input FPS

Knowing the difference between this two fields is crucial to work with Subtitle Workshop.

Input FPS is the FPS of the movie that the subtitle was originally made for. FPS is the FPS of the movie you want to adjust the subtitle for. You have to modify this field in order to convert FPS. When editing frame based subtitles there is no need for Input FPS (we only need FPS) so “Input FPS” will become useless after loading frame based subtitles.

To convert a 25 FPS subtitle file to 29,97, set “Input FPS” to 25, load the subtitle file and then set “FPS” to 29,97.

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