OK, I'm back.
The long version:
.srt files look like this: [It's a Wonderful Life opening]
———————————————
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.
4
00:01:38,880 --> 00:01:42,600
He never thinks about himself,
God, that's why he's in trouble.
5
00:01:42,680 --> 00:01:46,840
George is a good guy.
Give him a break, God...
———————————————
For Motion -- all those numbers have to go. If you don't have it already, download TextWrangler (it's free) and open the srt file. Go to Search > Find and in the dialog, make sure Grep is checked. In the find box type this regular expression:
\d.*\n
What this roughly translates into is:
find every line that starts with a decimal character and select everything until the end of the line.
There's a small square with a 'g' on it and a disclosure triangle. Click that and select Save - name the pattern something like "strip SRT numbers".
Click the Replace All button. The result will look like:
_____________________________
I owe everything to George
Bailey... Help him, dear Father.
Joseph, Jesus and Mary.
Help my friend, Mr. Bailey.
Help my son, George, tonight.
He never thinks about himself,
God, that's why he's in trouble.
George is a good guy.
Give him a break, God...
_______________________________
Add a first blank line then Save the file as xxxxxx-chapterX.txt for importing into Motion.
The extra empty lines are a good thing (sometimes you need to "blank" the text) and in general, I recommend at least double spacing throughout the file, in most cases.
While I'm at it, full length motion pictures are a little too much to manage, so I highly recommend cutting the file sizes down to "chapter sized" chunks... it will make things very much easier. 100 lines each would be about ideal (you'll see it when you start working with it - but you are not limited to that.)
If you make smaller file size chunks, then from FCPX export the corresponding Ranges (ProRes Proxy -- smaller, easier and you'll be throwing away the clips afterwards anyway.) [You can opt to use Audio only as well, but the visual cues help speed things up sometimes.]
Create a Generator project (you will want to save this "template project" to FCPX directly.)
Import a chapter video into Motion. Adjust the Project Length to the length of the imported video (very easy to do and there's a couple of different ways to accomplish it... )
From the generators menu, add Generators > Text Generators > File to the project.
In the Inspector for the File Generator, click the Browse button and load up your text file. Set the Speed to Custom and immediately Reset the Custom Speed when it appears (the default action is to play each line in order at a fixed rate of speed.) The Custom Speed parameter is based on percentage (0 - 100%) so you can see why 100 lines per text file is ideal.
Move the playhead to the beginning of the project and set the first keyframe at 0%.
Play the file and for each line spoken, [pause play] set a keyframe by option dragging the Custom Speed value until the appropriate line appears. Continue this process until the last line of the file. [You can adjust keyframe positions now or later for more precision... often, close enough is good for subtitles.]
All the keyframes will be linear in nature and when you play the file, the lines will go from one to the next and be mostly out of sync from your keyframes. NOT a big deal!
Open the keyframe editor (with the File generator selected) and select any keyframe, then type Command-A to select all of them. Then right click on any keyframe and from the pop-up menu, select Interpolation > Constant. This creates a Step-wise change from keyframe to keyframe and syncs all the text up to the audio. [The blank lines between sentences helps blank them out for long pauses and is why they're important!]
If you got this far, it sounds like a lot. It's not (except for following the audio and timing the keyframes, which is kind of tedious) but in exchange for typing in all the TC and line number data, it's a much easier option.
Before saving, you can use the Text > Format to select the font styles you like, and you can use Properties > Transform > Position (and keyframe these if you need to move the text around the canvas - use the interpolation > constant trick on this as well). [You won't get this feature with regular subtitling.]
When you're satisfied with the subtitles, Save the generator (create a category called Subtitles) and name it with the video and chapter used.
In FCPX, find the time position you need to start the subtitles and place the corresponding generator at the location... move on to the next and the next etc... At this point, it's that easy. (For the non-subtitled version, select all the generators and type V to disable them.)
When you're done with the project, go into the Finder and throw them all in the trash. If you have no further use for the project, they will be a waste of space.
PS - cutting a script file into 100-line chunks is easy with TextWrangler - just turn on line numbers for a guide. When you make the selection, you can find the word count at the buttom right edge of the document (the stats are: characters/words/lines - right next to the view zoom size drop-down menu at the end.... if you need to estimate the length of time by the number of words.)
PPS - this method can only display one distinct line at a time, and it's not easy to do a multi-line display of several nearly simultaneous spoken lines. It may become necessary to break the some parts of the script into speaker one, speaker two files and you really can't do two File generators at once (due to a perceived bug [could be a feature - you never know with Apple] in Motion... which might be fixed by now - I just don't know.) The File generator recognized line breaks, but it doesn't "print" them on the screen if you know what I mean. As part of the text formatting, you can use a Paragraph style Layout > Layout Method and manipulate Line Wraps (by use of extra space characters in the text.) I haven't experimented a lot with that so I can't really tell you (and it's been months since I've dealt with subtitles in general).
Hope this helps. Save your money. Buy Motion. It can be used for so much more than just subtitles.
