Time related features

Set delay

Subtitle Workshop can set a positive or a negative delay, in time or frames. The delay is a fixed time or frames (constant) that represents the difference of points where the subtitles should start, and actually start. To apply a delay, first load your subtitle, then click the “Edit/Timings/Set delay…” menu or press [Ctrl]+[D] keys. The delay dialog will pop up.

If you are working in the time mode, you should set a time delay, if you are working in the frames mode, you should set a frames delay. Subtitle Workshop will automatically detect it. You are able to choose if you want to apply the delay to all the subtitles or just to the selected ones, useful if only one part of the subtitle appears later than it should.

Adjust subtitles

Subtitle Workshop can synchronize subtitles to a video in four ways. Whatever method you want to use, the first thing you have to do is to load the subtitle file you are going to adjust, and for methods 1, 2 y 4 you need to load the video file you want to use as a reference.

Method 1: adjusting first and last dialogs
This method offers a lot of accuracy, and is recommended in most cases. After you load the subtitle file and video:

* Play the video until you reach the first spoken dialog or the first place that should be subtitled in the movie; when you hear/read it, take a note of the time (you will need it later).
* Seek to the end of the video and when you hear/read the last spoken dialog or the last place that should be subtitled, take note of the time.
* You can take these two time values from an external video player instead of using Subtitle Worksop’s video preview.
* After you follow these steps, click the “Edit/Timings/Adjust subtitles…” or the [Ctrl]+[B] keys. Switch to “Simple” tab. In “First spoken line” write the first time, and in “Last spoken line” write the last time. Then press Adjust! button.

Method 2: synchronize using two points

This method will work very well in most cases. It works by taking two points of the subtitle file and two points of the video, and calculate the times using a linear algorithm. The first pair of points will be called “First sync points” and the last pair of points will be called “Last sync points”. Each pair of points consists in one point in the subtitle and one point in the video, the point in the subtitle has the wrong times and the point of the video has the right times. After selecting the first and last sync points Subtitle Workshop calculates the rest of the times accordingly. The closer the first sync points are to the beginning and the last sync points to the end of the movie, the better results you are going to get.

Method 4: advanced subtitle adjust

Use this if the two points methods fail. This feature makes possible to adjust subtitles in the worst cases, when desynchronization is not constant, or varies in different parts of the subtitles. This system lets you select multiple subtitle/video points so that you can synchronize the subtitle by “parts”.

In the video preview controls, you will notice that last button is “Add subtitle/video synchronization point”. You will need this button later. These are the steps you should follow:

* Select the subtitle you want to mark as point. The point will always be the selected subtitle’s initial time. This subtitle can be any subtitle in the file.
* Play the video until you find the right time for that subtitle, when you do, click the “Add subtitle/video synchronization point” button or press the [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[P] keys. The Adjust subtitles window will appear, and advanced mode will be set by default. This window is “non-modal”, that means, you can still use the main Subtitle Workshop interface while it is opened.
* You need to repeat the two steps above for each point you want to add. You can use the “Add” button to enter a time manually, or the “Add from media” button to add points directly from the Adjust subtitles window (it works the same way as the button in the video preview control).

* Extrapolate. Subtitle Workshop will use mathematical routines to calculate the times for every subtitle in the file even if it is outside the scope of points. Using this you can have behaviours like the one you would obtain using “synchronize using two points”, but with more points.

* Return original time (no changes). If a time is outside the points range and you want to calculate the new time, Subtitle Workshop will return the original time so no changes will be made. This is useful, e.g. if you only want to adjust subtitles 100-200 and leave all the other subtitles as they are.

* Return displacement of neighbour point. If desired time is before first sync point, then it will calculate the new time using the displacement of the first sync point. If desired time is after last sync point, then it will calculate the new time using the displacement of the last sync point. Useful sometimes.

When you are done configuring all the settings, click the Adjust! button.

Duration limits

Duration limits makes possible to fix the duration of all the subtitles in a file to a range of time. Subtitles which appear less than 1 second are usually hard to read, except for “Yes” and similar, small, words. Sometimes there are subtitles with more characters and with short duration, or subtitles with durations greater than 10 seconds, in which cases you should use this feature. You can set a minimum and maximum possible duration for the subtitles. Each duration shorter than the minimum allowed duration will be increased to the minimum possible duration you set, without causing overlapping with the next subtitle. Each duration larger than the maximum possible duration will be set to the maximum duration you set.

To set duration limits click the “Edit/Timings/Set duration limits…” menu or press the [Ctrl]+[L] keys. After that you need to enter the maximum and minimum duration in milliseconds and press the Apply button.

Time expander/reducer

Time expander/reducer is a very nice feature in the cases you have a subtitle file that contains some long subtitles with short durations. It is close to “Duration limits” but much more useful if the file only has long subtitles with short times. This feature lets you expand or reduce the duration of certain subtitles under certain conditions. To access to time expander/reducer click the “Edit/Timings/Time expander/reducer” menu or press [Shift]+[Ctrl]+[Y] keys.

The amount of time you want to expand or reduce the duration is customizable, and may be set in seconds (with a precision of up to one millisecond) if you are working in time mode, or in frames (with a precision of up to one frame) if you are working in frames mode. You can also choose to expand/reduce the duration only under certain conditions, only if the subtitle is longer than a customizable number of characters and/or only if duration is shorter/longer (depends if you want to expand or reduce duration) than a fixed time. Additionally, the “prevent overlapping” check box should be checked so that no overlapping errors occur while increasing the final time of the subtitles. When you have configured everything, you have to select if you want to apply time expander to all the subtitles or only to the selected subtitles. To finally expand the durations of the pertinent subtitles, press the Apply button.

Read times from file

Useful if you have one subtitle file in which the text of each subtitle is right but the timings are not, and you have another file with the same number of subtitles and with the right times. You just have to load the file with the right texts, and then click the “Edit/Timings/Read timings from file” menu or press the [Shift]+[Ctrl]+[T] keys. A dialog will pop up, all you have to do is select the file with the right times in that dialog and load it.

Automatic durations

“Automatic durations” is a very useful feature when you have a subtitle file in which the duration of all (or some) subtitles is totally wrong. By specifying a time per character, word and line (the default values give very good results) Subtitle Workshop will calculate the appropiate duration for the subtitle. Another use this feature may have is when subtitling videos, to go faster you can only set start times manually and Subtitle Workshop will calculate all final times. To access “Automatic durations” click the “Edit/Timings/Automatic durations” menu or the [Shift]+[Ctrl]+[R] keys.

You can additionally specify if you want to apply new duration in all cases, only if it is greater than original or only if it is smaller than original. You can also apply calculated durations to all the subtitles or just the selected ones.

The use of this feature together with Duration limits and Detect too long/short durations from Information and Errors can give excellent results in a short time.

Shift subtitles

This feature moves all the selected subtitles initial time a specified number of milliseconds forward/backwards, without modifying their duration. To shift selected subtitles forward, click the “Edit/Timings/Shift +X milliseconds” menu or the [Shift]+[Ctrl]+[H] keys. To shift selected subtitles backwards, click the “Edit/Timings/Shift -X milliseconds” menu or the [Shift]+[Ctrl]+[N] keys.

Cf. How to split your subtitles file with Subtitle Workshop