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How to convert titles into Closed Captions in Final Cut Pro?

Hello everybody,


I am subtitling a project and I have created the subtitles with Fast Titles:

http://www.ilgattohanuovecode.it/tool/final-cut-fast-titles/index.php

which is a great tool and saves hours and days of manual work.


But, I need to convert these normal titles into Closed Captions and I can't figure a way how to do this ...


Does anybody know how to do it?


Thanks!

Posted on Aug 5, 2024 9:00 AM

Reply
11 replies

Aug 5, 2024 1:38 PM in response to Hirapuri

Sometimes... the way I handle it is: instead of creating (simple text) titles at all, I'll just use Closed Captions in the project AS titles. I'll do this particularly if I want to have automatic translations available (like on YouTube). What I'll also do is put a "sign" up at the beginning of the video to **turn on CC**:



so viewers will know to activate it.


FCP will caption files and they're easy to upload to YT. (Use SRT.)

Aug 5, 2024 10:52 AM in response to Hirapuri

This online tool can do the reverse of what you are asking - convert captions to titles:


https://en.editingtools.io/subtitles/


There is probably something available, but I am not aware of it.


If you care to share a sample file, I could try to conjure up a makeshift tool, but I can make no promises.

It is all a matter of patterns and text processing, after all.



Aug 5, 2024 11:03 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Thanks for answering Luis,


my subtitles are nothing special, so any simple text can serve as a sample.


Maybe I wasn't able to explain it properly. What I get from the "Fast titles" is just simple text, but splitted properly, formatted properly to get a good subtitle. So there is nothing special about it - it is simple text. It just simplifies the process of getting the text in the timeline. But having to copy and paste every single bit to Closed Captions turns all this as being useless.


Maybe there is another tool which converts plain text into captions, but I'm not aware of it. This would, of course, solve the problem much better. This could be a feature request for the FCP developers to simplify the process of creating multilingual subtitles. I am aware of one AI tool which creates captions automatically but to my knowledge it doesn't translate to other languages.

Aug 5, 2024 10:59 PM in response to fox_m

Well, I don't know if You read completely what I was writing. The thing is that I need to turn a lot of translated text into FCP captions and I'm trying to find the easiest way to do it. The creation of simple text titles is very easy, thanks to the "Fast titles" online tool. But I don't know how to easily turn them into captions. So my aim is to create captions.

Aug 6, 2024 1:20 AM in response to Hirapuri

The syntax of an srt file (one of the most common captions formats) is very simple.


For example:


00:00:00,001 —> 00:00:10,000

Good morning

2

00:00:10,001 —> 00:00:20,000

Welcome everyone

3



(I am writing this on iPhone and without an example but that’s the gist of it)

You have a caption number, then a time interval, then the text, and so on


You could do a little Python script to take a file like


Good morning

Welcome everyone



and produce something as the above.

Aug 23, 2024 9:54 AM in response to Hirapuri

I was finally able to have some time to do this.

It turns out that it is quite easy to use the Python srt package.

Since you may or may not have a Python environment ready to use, I suggest an online tool like Google Colab.


I think you can reproduce this easily. Just replace the text betwen triple quotes with your own text (keeping the triple quotes), and at the end, copy the output and save it to a file using the .srt extension.


Below is the code.


Put this in one cell to "install" the srt package into your Colab notebook:


!pip install srt


Then in another cell you can put the code to generate the srt syntax from your lines of text:


text = """
Le commandant
José Veríssimo
et son équipage
vous souhaite
les bienvenus
à bord de notre Boeing
"""

import srt
import datetime

subtitles = []
for index,line in enumerate(text.split('\n'),1):
    start_time = datetime.timedelta(seconds=5*index+1)
    end_time = datetime.timedelta(seconds=5*index+5)
    subtitles.append(srt.Subtitle(index,start=start_time,
                        end=end_time,
                        content=line.rstrip()))

print(srt.compose(subtitles))



How to convert titles into Closed Captions in Final Cut Pro?

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