Subtitle woes

I was trying to create the subtitles for a video with a non-native English speaker speaking - in my mind quite understandable English. I faced a number of issues:

1) Subtitle generation got stuck "for ever" in "Initialing" stage, had to kill Resolve as even Stop did not work. Resolve was clearly working with GPU and CPU both working all the time.

2) After having forced stop, some of the videos where showing as "offline" but audio was still OK. I had a backup audio track for the video and I could generate the automatic subtitles from that track.

3) The quality of the generated subtitles was very poor, perhaps one out of 10 did not need (significant) manual editing.

4) After I saved and uploaded the .srt file to Youtube, all texts were pre/postfaced with < b > and < / b > that showed up in the Yt video. I had to remove them in a separate editor as I could not figure out what if anything resulted in them in Resolve.

5) For large amounts of subtitle editing, the edting interface where selection does not follow the playhead, is very laborious. Also the fact that the "spacebar" does not work to advance after you have edited makes for a lot of mouse clicking.

If you list your system specs: OS, RAM, GPU, CPU - it helps people offer advice.

If you list your system specs: OS, RAM, GPU, CPU - it helps people offer advice.

Specs for subtitles? Irrelevant. The software is broken. I’ve been using Studio since 2015. They managed to break the software. It’s a tragedy. New features don’t work and now basic old features don’t work. They have a lot of work to do.

Specs for subtitles? Irrelevant.

Not when one of the issues being discussed is a hardware driven feature... in this case presumably the ML (GPU) driven auto subtitling feature. Other than that, just as a general rule, troubleshooting just about anything is always going to be more easily focussed when underlying specifics are provided... and in Resolve that's usually in the form of system specs and crash logs etc.

4) After I saved and uploaded the .srt file to Youtube, all texts were pre/postfaced with < b > and < / b > that showed up in the Yt video. I had to remove them in a separate editor as I could not figure out what if anything resulted in them in Resolve.

When you export the SRT from Resolve you can set the format as 'Subtitle files without formatting in the export dialog.

5) For large amounts of subtitle editing, the edting interface...

I feel your pain all too often. :/

When you export the SRT from Resolve you can set the format as 'Subtitle files without formatting in the export dialog.

Ah, thanks Andy. Seems this is only available on the Deliver page, when exporting from the timeline I don't get any options, seems "SRT with formatting" is the default?

Is there a hidden setting somewhere controlling what file format I get when exporting directly from timeline?
Any idea where the < b >bolding/formatting for the subtitles is set, I cannot find a setting in the styling section?

subtitle settings.jpg (52.25 KiB) Viewed 448 times

Font Face defines your text weight, no?
If it says bold/italic, you get the format 'quotes' in the exported srt.

4. Although I always export srt's from the timeline, and never had this problem with YT tbh.
You do have the option to check the text and timing before committing your subs in YT, so no need to tweak them in a separate app. Unless you have lots of bold/italic text bits...

5. Oh yes.... Annoying as bleep...

Font Face defines your text weight, no?
If it says bold/italic, you get the format 'quotes' in the exported srt.

As you can see, the font face is "Regular"?

So you mean it adds the bold tags in the srt, while the font is set to regular?
That's a first for me, sorry..

So you mean it adds the bold tags in the srt, while the font is set to regular?
That's a first for me, sorry..

Did a new set and if I set the font face to "Light" (for Open Sans) so, thanks, it is indeed the font face that seems to control this albeit in a slightly surprising way?

Not all fonts have all variations.