Resolve 15 - Subtitles problems & improvements

1 - When I use Justify to bottom of safe title, 2 sentences stuck to the bottom of safe title, but when I have only one sentence, Resolve add an empty line, so the sentence is not stuck to the bottom of safe title. I have the same problem when I evaluate Pablo Rio. Now it is fixed. So, NEED TO FIX IT ASAP.

2- Need to add a Save and Load preset for my adjustments of stroke, font, drop shadow ( I see that there is a 3 dots in Inspector and maybe this is the button to save and load the preset, but not implemented yet ).

3- Need to implement a way to put italic to invidual letter or word. It is a necessity to do subtitles.

4- Need to have a better control for Stroke, add outside adj., opacity and softness.

5- Able to import .SCC file to verify visually the closed captions.

6- Able to export the .SRT or Webvtt file without the video and audio option. For the moment, when I use Separate file and desactivate Video, automatically the Audio file is enable. So the export is longer and I have a audio file that I don't need at all. I just need the .SRT or Webvtt file.

7- When I export subtitles from a sequence starting at 10h, the .SRT and Webvtt have timings starting à 00. Need to have a file starting to the t/c start of my sequence.

8- When I import .SRT or Webvtt containing t/c, good to have a way to drop the subtitle file and Resolve put the subtitles automatically in the timeline reflect to the t/c. Faster, precise and more efficient.

1 - When I use Justify to bottom of safe title, 2 sentences stuck to the bottom of safe title, but when I have only one sentence, Resolve add an empty line, so the sentence is not stuck to the bottom of safe title. I have the same problem when I evaluate Pablo Rio. Now it is fixed. So, NEED TO FIX IT ASAP

This feature already exists, there are different anchor options in the Track Style tab.

3- Need to implement a way to put italic to invidual letter or word. It is a necessity to do subtitles.

You already can, use the Caption tab and deselect 'Use Track Style'. Admittedly the style will now revert to the default Open Sans style so any changes to font and placements will have to be recreated (hoping BMD will implement presets at both track and caption level and that caption style settings are ganged to Track Style settings until you untick this box so you only have to change one or two things rather than every setting you've adjusted in Track Style!)

7- When I export subtitles from a sequence starting at 10h, the .SRT and Webvtt have timings starting à 00. Need to have a file starting to the t/c start of my sequence.

Don't all SRT file timecodes begin at 0 hours regardless? I've never seen one that differs from this and I've worked in localisation for years. Why do you *need* an SRT file with a 10 hour timecode?

- tom -

This feature already exists, there are different anchor options in the Track Style tab.

No, I try with all anchor options in Track Style, and subtitles with only one line appear higher than the bottom of the safe title. Subtitles with 2 lines are OK.

This feature already exists, there are different anchor options in the Track Style tab.

No, I try with all anchor options in Track Style, and subtitles with only one line appear higher than the bottom of the safe title. Subtitles with 2 lines are OK.

choose the anchor option that moves the 2nd line upwards and position your base level subtitle accordingly, it works just fine no matter how many lines you have.

One more thing, when I import SRT file with some italic subtitles, all subtitles are non italic.

For example, when I have a SRT file like this (as seen in Word software):

10:15:48,407 --> 10:15:50,993
<i>there's a pretty little house</i>
<i>in front of the church</i>

Resolve should to put in italic all those 2 sentences. But for now, I have to desactivate manually Use Track Style and ajust by myself the italic.

I used EZ Titles software for 3 years and EZ titles plug-in in Avid Media Composer to finish all subtitles project done in Resolve and I never have problem with italic. EZ titles works like a charm !

I hope that Resolve 15 will manage in the future, a way to automatically detect italic, ajust one
line of sentence justify at the bottom of safe title, etc.

But for now, c'mon BMD, you did a very good job with R15, keep on to develop Subtitles with better ajustments !!!

2- Need to add a Save and Load preset for my adjustments of stroke, font, drop shadow ( I see that there is a 3 dots in Inspector and maybe this is the button to save and load the preset, but not implemented yet ).

Just bumping this feature request - would be really helpful to have this as I add captions to all my videos and have to reconfigure all the settings each time.

Thanks BMD

Here's my 2 cents on Embedded CEA-608 Captions issues in Resolve 15:

1) Captions that are more than 32 characters fail to render, even if they are spread over two lines. The limit is supposed to be 32 characters per line, not 32 per total caption.
Render stops with error message “ Recording failed with Error : Subtitle is too long."

2) Rendering CEA-608 in h264 results in caption track that is only 3 frames (according to the property inspector in Quicktime 7 Pro. And captions do not display at all (even in the first three frames).

Rendering to ProRes works. Caption track shows full duration in QT 7 property inspector BUT are NOT viewable in QT7, but they are in QT X.

Exporting from ProRes to h264 is not an option, as the export process strips out the Captions track.

3) Even if multiple Subtitle tracks are present, only the one with Visibility Enabled is output. Outputting multiple tracks for multi-language support would be great.

4) An observation, not that it necessarily matters much, but could be confusing to someone monitoring a long render: When playing the timeline in the deliver page, the captions are displayed. However, while rendering, they are not displayed, regardless of the export codec (ProRes or h364) and whether or not they will actually work in the final file.

Captioning Feature Requests:

5) Hopefully CEA-708 support will be added soon…?

6) Hopefully support will be added in the future for: auto detecting illegal characters, illegal durations (less than 1 second), and a few of the other enforced rules from within the subtitles editor, prior to rendering, rather than going to Deliver and lookin for error messages during rendering.

7) It would be useful to be able to have more than one subtitle track visible at a time, for perhaps translators using an English master caption track on the first track, then temporarily increasing the Y position of the second track to allow both tracks to be visible simultaneously instead of on top of each other. Add the end of the translating and editing the additional language track(s), the Y position would be reset

8) Having a few more Transcribing/Captioning workflow features would give Resolve 99% the necessary features provided by 3rd party captioning programs in order to efficiently create captions from scratch within resolve. In my opinion, it would be great to add some sort of captioning “mode” similar to the ADR functionality in the Fairlight page, where a preference for a caption length/range duration is set (i.e. the 4 second default in other transcribing programs) playback would then continuously loop over that section while the caption is typed and edited, once the return key is hit, the caption would be set and the playback range would automatically advance to the next section of the timeline (incrementing by the range duration, and the process repeats.

I can’t tell you how happy we are with the advances in Resolve! We have re-organized the entire Production & Post workflow of our company around it. Please keep up the outstanding work.