How can I burn captions/subtitles onto the video in FCPX?

There are several PC apps that do this.

http://www.any-video-converter.com/add-srt-subtitle-to-output-video.php

Here's a MINDLESS article about Macs:

http://www.ehow.com/how_7385753_use-srt-subtitle-files.html

Personally, I've never used .srt files. I've always found it easier to do individual text files rendered into the video.

Good luck, please come back and tell us how you solved your problem if you don't get any better help here.

Motion can create subtitles.

If you have the .srt file, or a well formatted text file, then applying subtitles is relatively easy... but difficult to explain 😝

An SRT file is formatted like:

1

00:01:23,920 --> 00:01:29,480

I owe everything to George

Bailey... Help him, dear Father.

2

00:01:29,520 --> 00:01:35,320

Joseph, Jesus and Mary.

Help my friend, Mr. Bailey.

3

00:01:35,680 --> 00:01:38,840

Help my son, George, tonight.

Etc... An SRT file will need to be opened in TextEdit/TextWrangler or the like and saved as a TXT file. Motion can only open TXT files for the File generator.

You only need the actual text double spaced like:

----------

<open the file with a blank line here>

I owe everything to George Bailey... Help him, dear Father.

Joseph, Jesus and Mary. Help my friend, Mr. Bailey.

Help my son, George, tonight.

<close the file with a blank line here>

-----------------------------

Break your project up into 10 to 20 minute segments if it's a long project! Separate the text into separate files to match.

Export those regions out of FCPX in a low quality version (email, small or medium, faster encode is good enough -- you will not retain this when you save the Motion project.)

Create a new Motion Project. Import the video. Adjust the project length to the length of the imported video.

Add a Generators > Text Generators > File. In the File generator inspector, browse for and load your text file.

In the Generator > File inspector, set the Speed to Custom. Immediately turn down the disclosure triangle on the right side and reset parameter (clear the keyframes that are "default".)

Move the playhead to the beginning of the project and set a keyframe on the Custom Speed.

Play.

For the start of each spoken line, advance the Custom Speed to a next value that reveals the next line (and if there is enough space, select the next blank line.)

When you're done setting the keyframes, right click on Custom Speed and Show In Keyframe Editor. Select a keyframe and type Command-A to select all. Right click on one of the keyframes and select Interpolation > Constant from the popup menu.

Play to check the "presentation". You can use the keyframe editor to fine tune the appearance of each line. You can animate the location of the text in the canvas (use the Constant interpolation here as well.)

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is... but it is definitely less work than creating a captioning file from scratch (with timecodes, etc.) or entering each line Title by Title in FCPX.

When you're done, Delete the media file (it's no longer needed). Go to File > Publish Template to save it as a generator for FCPX. I recommend setting up a Category called Subtitles (they're all one-shot disposable templates) and naming the project ProjectNameChapterNum or similar. Find the mark in the storyline where the subtitles should start an place the subtitle generator.

When you've published your project, you can go back and delete these generators... they probably won't be reusable.

Hope this helps.

I was fairly certain there's no way to automate the process by using an .sml or .srt file. Fox, if he opens the .srt in a text editor, he has to go in and manually remove all of the timecode lines, right? Select, delete? Over and over? Never used .srt myself.

I'm familiar with the idea of creating a movie (or effects composition file) in After Effects or Motion and dropping that onto the FCP timeline. Using Constant keyframes basically instantly advances a solid column of text from one vertical position to the next, revealing only the lines one wants to have on screen at any given moment.

I've not used .srt or .sml files for the text content, though. I resort to doing individual text items. If I have a transcript, it's a simple matter of creating one text object with all of the parameters set the way I want them, duplicating it 20 to 100 times, and then copying and pasting from the transcript document into the individual text objects. Seems about the same about of work. And I've had the scripts change on me! Correcting a single item is much easier than trying to edit the entire Motion project. Usually. but my projects are not feature-length, either.

The easiest way to get subtitles burned into video? Hire a subtitling/caption service, of course.

LLook up spheric.com. Andreas Kiel has done a huge amount of work on subtitles snd closed captioning and using XML to work with these in FCP.

The utility Tom was talking about i scalled X-Title Importer. It is supposed to do exactly what you need.

http://www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/XTI/index.html

David Bogie Chq-1 wrote:

I was fairly certain there's no way to automate the process by using an .sml or .srt file. Fox, if he opens the .srt in a text editor, he has to go in and manually remove all of the timecode lines, right? Select, delete? Over and over? Never used .srt myself.

No. That's not right. The File behavior displays an entire line of text at a time. If you use the default setting of Constant for the speed, then the File behavior will play EVERY line in order at ProjectLength/NumLines speed. However, when you use Custom Speed and keyframe the lines, you can essentially "cherry pick" which lines you want to display from the file. So it is easily possible to bypass the timecode lines. Going through the file and deleting all the timecode is a terrible amount of extra work, so I wouldn't have recommended it.

Of course.

A regular DUH moment, thanks.

Very cool. Who knew?

The thing is donation-ware so have your PayPal or Visa ready. It will process 50 titles at a time but if you pay for it, you can use it forever.

This thing, if it works as promised, is going to make this task easy, almost fun. Interface is complex! User manual is about 45 pages. Should cover everything you want to know.

Since X-Title Importer comes along with several free Motion Templates designed for subtitling.Standard users can use use a simple "drag'n drop" mode while the advanced options allow to prepare subtitles for a professional personal, perfect and smooth integration into FCP X.

Beside supporting most Motion Titles starting with version 1.7 XTI also supports Digital Heaven's DH_SubtitleX Motion Generator. DH_Subtitle is a popular subtitle generator since early days of FCP. With the launch of FCP X it was updated to DH_SubtitleX. Now since the the release of FCP X 10.1 it is fully integrated into the X-Title group.