VLC media player, the popular open-source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered VLC media player, the open-source video software developed by nonprofit VideoLan, has topped 6 billion downloads.
I know AI has some PR issues at the moment but I can’t see how this could possibly be interpreted as a net negative here.
In most cases, people will go for (manually) written subtitles rather than autogenerated ones, so the use case here would most often be in cases where there isn’t a better, human-created subbing available.
I just can’t see AI / autogenerated subtitles of any kind taking jobs from humans because they will always be worse/less accurate in some way.
We started doing subtitling near the end of my time as an editor and I had to create the initial English ones (god forbid we give the translation company another couple hundred bucks to do it) and yeah…the timestamps are the hardest part.
I can type at 120 wpm but that’s not very helpful when you can only write a sentence at a time
Do you run the video and type the subtitles in some program at the same time, and it keeps score of the time at which you typed, which you manually adjust for best timing of the subtitle appearance afterwards? Or did you manually note down timestamps from the start?
We were an Adobe house so I did it inside of premiere. I can’t remember if it was built in or a plugin but there was two ways depending on if the shoot was scripted or ad-libbed. If it was scripted, I’d import a txt file into premiere and break it apart as needed with markers on the timeline. It was tedious but by far better than the alternative - manually typing it at each marker.
I initially tried making the markers all first but I kept running into issues with the timing. Subtitles have both a beginning and an end timestamp and I often wouldn’t leave enough room to be able to actually read it.
This was over a decade ago, I’ll bet it’s gotten easier. I know Premiere has a transcription feature that’s pretty good
I only did it once for a school project involving translation of a film scene (also over a decade ago) but we just manually wrote an SRT file, that was miserable 😄
Is there a cross section of people who do live subtitles and people that have experience being a stenographer? Asking as I would imagine that using a stenographic keyboard would allow them to keep up with what’s being said.
I know AI has some PR issues at the moment but I can’t see how this could possibly be interpreted as a net negative here.
In most cases, people will go for (manually) written subtitles rather than autogenerated ones, so the use case here would most often be in cases where there isn’t a better, human-created subbing available.
I just can’t see AI / autogenerated subtitles of any kind taking jobs from humans because they will always be worse/less accurate in some way.
Autogenerated subtitles are pretty awesome for subtitle editors I’d imagine.
even if they get the words wrong, but the timestamps right, it’d still save a lot of time
We started doing subtitling near the end of my time as an editor and I had to create the initial English ones (god forbid we give the translation company another couple hundred bucks to do it) and yeah…the timestamps are the hardest part.
I can type at 120 wpm but that’s not very helpful when you can only write a sentence at a time
So, if you can tell us, how did the process work?
Do you run the video and type the subtitles in some program at the same time, and it keeps score of the time at which you typed, which you manually adjust for best timing of the subtitle appearance afterwards? Or did you manually note down timestamps from the start?
We were an Adobe house so I did it inside of premiere. I can’t remember if it was built in or a plugin but there was two ways depending on if the shoot was scripted or ad-libbed. If it was scripted, I’d import a txt file into premiere and break it apart as needed with markers on the timeline. It was tedious but by far better than the alternative - manually typing it at each marker.
I initially tried making the markers all first but I kept running into issues with the timing. Subtitles have both a beginning and an end timestamp and I often wouldn’t leave enough room to be able to actually read it.
This was over a decade ago, I’ll bet it’s gotten easier. I know Premiere has a transcription feature that’s pretty good
That’s interesting thank you.
I only did it once for a school project involving translation of a film scene (also over a decade ago) but we just manually wrote an SRT file, that was miserable 😄
Oh man that sounds awful… If I had to write it manually, I think I’d use Excel
Is there a cross section of people who do live subtitles and people that have experience being a stenographer? Asking as I would imagine that using a stenographic keyboard would allow them to keep up with what’s being said.
Probably! Though live captions aren’t quite the same as they’re not timestamped
Not judging this as bad or good, but for sure if it’s offline generated it will bloat the size of the program.
Yeah this is exactly what we should want from AI. Filling in an immediate need, but also recognizing it won’t be as good as a pro translation.
I believe it’s limited in scope to speech recognition at this stage but hey ho