So the current show I am working on uses subtitles. A LOT of subtitles. This is a show that re-enacts 911 phone calls, and it isn’t the clearest audio, so we subtitle everything. Well…we, uh…had some problems with those subtitles.

Typos.

And not just a couple. There were a lot that had something spelled wrong…or two spaces, or missing commas…or something. The producer was a tad miffed at this. He was wondering who to blame…the editors? Another producer came to our defense…

“Hey, I haven’t met one editor that could spell! Not one.”

Uh, thanks…I guess.

No, I understand where he is coming from. I told my wife about this issue and she said “Well, who is supposed to check the spelling?” I said that I was. She laughed. “YOU? You can’t spell.”

True…true…

So, we needed to figure something out. We have another producer who is a master of spelling and punctuation, but we need to somehow get all the text that we have in the show to her to check. And since we use the TEXT tool in FCP she would have to either sit at one of our edit stations, or we’d have to get her a copy of FCP so she could look at the project on her machine. Well, those weren’t viable options. We needed another alternative. I wrote a few programmers I knew to ask if they had any solutions. I knew that we could export an XML of the cut, and that the text data must be in there somewhere…so some solution must exist.

Andreas Kiel of Spherico answered the call.

First he mentioned an application that he wrote a while ago, but no longer supports (but still sells) called Title Cleaner. This is a great simple application that has a built in spell checker, for multiple languages. And removes extra spaces and poor punctuation. Well, that is one solution…one that would be fine, but then there was another solution that was better. Because I needed to somehow get the text to our spell master…and while we are on that track, we need to export a document of ALL the subtitles as part of our final show deliverables. Something some intern has been doing…manually typing what was on the screen.

So we were able to kill two birds with one stone with Title Exchange Pro. This will export a file that you can open with Excel, complete with timecode IN and OUT points. Perfect! But it’s usefulness doesn’t stop there. Using this you can export your subtitles as a file that you can import into DVD Studio Pro to make an embedded subtitle file. Nice…

Title Exchange Pro is 135.00 Euros…and with today’s exchange rate that is..well, close to $200.
Title Cleaner is 25.00 Euros, which works out to be about $50.

So, up to you. I just like the fact that I wrote to someone to ask “hey, can you make something that does this” and they reply, “ah, but I already have.”

Look at those links…Title Exchange does a lot more, but being that I am narrow sighted and only paying attention to what I need, that is all I pay attention to.