How to use Subtitle Workshop to create or edit your subtitles


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.