French & Arabic Subtitles in FCP

Neil195 wrote:

So are you saying i just need to action arabic in the input menu and FCP will automatically recognise a suitable arabic font on an imported xml file.

The input menu has no role to play in what you are doing. There is no need to change it or activiate it or do anything at all with it. It only gets used if you are typing in the Arabic by hand from the keyboard.

Just to let you see what unconnected Arabic looks like, in case that happens to you from a Windows font, here is a picture from the Pages app. The Arial Unicode version is unacceptable. But hopefully you will have no problems.

FCP should accept Arabic and French text without any special set up. For Arabic you need to be sure the font is set to one supplied by Apple, like Geeza Pro.

Neil195 wrote:

I was directed to Veranda which also has arabic text. Is this font also ok as an Arabic subtitle.

Do you mean Verdana? If so, you can try it, but sometimes trying to use a windows font like that will result is disconnected Arabic, which is not acceptable. Apple provides other Arabic fonts besides Geeza Pro: Al Bayan, Baghdad, Damascus, Decotype Naskh, Nadeem, Kufi.

The flag is for a keyboard and is irrelevant unless you are typing Arabic in yourself. You be able to choose the Arabic keyboard from that menu and type Arabic into any text field if you want to.

PS Sorry, I forgot that the xml file is not itself relevant here. You need to look at the .tif files created by Belle Nuit and see if the Arabic is present. If not, you need to check whether what you pasted into Belle Nuit document window was in the correct format, or if you used File > Import, whether it was in the correct format and encoding (utf-8 normally, unless your translator sent you old win arabic junk in win-1256).

If all the inputs seem right but the .tifs do not show any Arabic, you need to try switching fonts (assuming there is a place to do that in Belle Nuit) or seek help from the folks who make Belle Nuit or in their forums.

Just saw this thread. You might want to consider using title exchange pro.

http://www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/

I used it on a project where we had to generate xml files for a digital cinema package. Unfortunately upon check the DCP, I found some problems with the subtitles. I was not going to be able to play the dcp to check the rvised file, but I was able to take the file provided by the sutitling service and convert it using title exchange pro to a file that I was able to import into fcp to check the subtitles.

The author of the program was very helpful when I ran into some minor issues along the way.

hello..

when i write arabic subtitles in final cut pro ,

the words gets divided like this

مشكلة = م ش ك ل ة

why ? how can i fix this problem ,

this happend in all arabic fonts

except the standard font which

called :ALBAYAN

Aysar.1 wrote:

this happend in all arabic fonts

except the standard font which

called :ALBAYAN

You normally can't use windows arabic fonts in Apple apps. You must use one of the Arabic fonts provided by Apple: Geeza Pro is the standard. Others are Al Bayan, Baghdad, Damascus, Decotype Naskh, Nadeem, Kufi. If you are running 10.9, there are still more.

If you send me a copy of your xml I can have a look and see if I see anything strange (tom at bluesky dot org).