Caption format questions (ITT & CEA-608)

Hi Ben,

Most of the work I've done with captioning up til now has been SRT*. It is "stupidly simple": a line number, a time range in HR:MN:SC,ms format, good for any frame rate and up to two lines of text (followed by another newline), but always in 5 line blocks of text only. It also seems to be the most prevalent form of CC. Since it is so widespread in usage, I thought it would be convenient to be able to import them into FCPX. SCC is off-the-charts complicated, luckily, FCPX will already import SCC files. ITT format is the next most simple format I've seen mainly because it's in readable XML and it's a simplified version of the cea-608 spec. FCPX converts readily back and forth from ITT and 608 (and that's a good thing).

About an hour after I posted my request, I figured out that simply converting to 608 and back to ITT restores the black strip backgrounds for ITT. It's a little ridiculous, and was hoping for a "better way" but it works. I can just make a note of it in my instructions that changing formats back and forth will fix the problem or simply import as ITT and convert to 608. There are much better controls over the 608 captioning anyway, including the Text Background Color option (which appears to be *missing* from the ITT options!) Restarting FCPX does not seem to fix the problem of missing black backgrounds (I only just launched FCPX after today's startup...)

Guess it's feedback time...

I'll get back with a link if you'd like to try out the SRT converter when I've finished it (I need to move it to another site.)

Thanks for your suggestion.

*before CC support, if I needed to I would run an SRT through Textwrangler and strip out all the line numbers and timing lines (regex) and save the file as a "manuscript"; import that file into Motion and keyframe the lines for subtitles - a little time consuming, but easy.

Hi Tom,

I thought that at first, but the conversion is 100% perfect mainly due to the fact that I went through every possible framerate and generated a CC file, studied the generated code and followed it down to the number of spaces used to indent XML lines and the user has to supply the framerate for the target project. I even correct for start and end frame numbers — there is never an overlap. It also doesn't make sense that I can import ITT files exported by FCPX and they come back in without the black background strips.

I did figure out a workaround (in the reply to BenB)—I was just hoping for some thing I overlooked to restore or reset that black strip.

Can you point me in the direction of an SRT that delivers styles? All I've ever seen is this format:

1
 00:00:00,599 --> 00:00:04,160
 >> ALICE: Hi, my name is Alice Miller and this is John Brown
 
 2
 00:00:04,160 --> 00:00:06,770
 >> JOHN: and we're the owners of Miller Bakery.
 
 3
 00:00:06,770 --> 00:00:10,880
 >> ALICE: Today we'll be teaching you how to make
 our famous chocolate chip cookies!
 
 4
 00:00:10,880 --> 00:00:16,700
 [intro music]

[Subviewer is almost the same format except no line numbers and time is hr:mn:sc.ms instead of ,ms — I might be able to tweak my regex to accept Subviewer as well.]

I agree that the disappearing black strip is a bug! But good to know it's not likely my translations.

That probably explains the disappearing background.

I stand corrected... although Subrip is actually an open source (Windows) application used to literally rip subtitles from any digital video source (line 21's I figure... a.k.a. EIA-608s). My little script just turns them back into ITT which seems to be a subset of cea-608.

I was originally using SRT files to create subtitles with Motion. It was extremely easy to strip out the line numbers and timing lines with Textwrangler (free app) that has regular expression search/replace. Then use the resultant file (File generator) in Motion setting keyframes on the Speed parameter (interpolation Constant). So *this* project of mine is more of the same thing except now the time spent going through a project and keyframing lines of text is no longer necessary.

Didn't say SRT was an app -- I said "SubRip" is a windows app. And yes, the format has been around for quite awhile now.

SRT style is like HTML style: like <i> for italic

Read the iTunes/ITT specs published by Apple how to match styles.

I've never seen that in an srt file (although I just did find an example).

Thanks for the heads up!