Burn a Text or Image into a Video

Burning text, subtitles or images in a video is commonly used for watermarking videos before uploading to a web service like YouTube. Another usage is to add "hard" resp. permanent subtitles to a video that can't be easily erased. As a big plus such subtitles can be seen on any kind of video player in existence and there is only a single video file to be distributed.

Burning text

The most basic method is to just enter the texts and their time indices manually in the list in the tab 'Text To Burn':

Spell Checking

There is a separate switch in the Settings to enable spell checking for burn texts. This will help minimizing typos. In general it will use the currently chosen app language from the Settings, not the one of the Windows OS. Below you will get a separate combo box for selecting the language. If that one is empty it will use the app's language. If a subtitle file is loaded that has a three letters subtitle language in its file name (eg. "Title.ger.srt") Multimedia Xpert will do a lookup in a file called "LanguageList.csv" which it will copy from Multimedia Xpert's executable directory to the app data directory (by default "C:\Users\<yourName>\AppData\Roaming\Atlas Informatik\Multimedia Xpert") at first use. It will use that to determine the spell check language that corresponds to a given subtitle language. If the combo box doesn't change, Xpert hasn't found the corresponding language. In this case you can either check and extend this file manually or switch to Atlas Subtitler's Subtitle Languages dialog, update the list with its button there, and then press the button "Get Languages from Atlas Subtitler".

If you have a spelling error you can either replace the word by one of the proposed ones, add the word to a custom list of correct words or ignore the word. Ignoring will remember until the app is closed while adding will store the word in a file in the Atlas data directory (by default "C:\Users\<yourName>\AppData\Roaming\Atlas Informatik") and will be shared by all Atlas apps. There is one textual file per each language called "CustomWordList.<language>.lex". If you need to merge some of them we can recommend using the tab Dictionary Merge in Mighty Desktop's File Center.

Find & Replace

A find in the subtitle texts is supported. You have the additional possibilities to use the file system joker chracters '*' and '?'. On the other hand you could use the infinite possibilities of Regular Expressions (Regex). Both, the Find and Replace string have a history for picking the same string later again.

The search can restart at the top if the end is encountered and also do that backwards. Note that you can save the entire list in the undo buffer by a button press before starting to replace something. The 'Replace All' button does this automatically for you before it makes its first replacement.

Text Styling

The texts can be multiline and styled in numerous ways, for example font, fontsize, shadow type, rotation, a colored background, underline, overline and more. There is a specially designed interactive editor for combining this:

If needed, additional info parts can be expanded, which are the font samples and the details about a font.

The foreground and background of the font can be selected or entered in text boxes:

There are three swatch types to select from or a system color can be dropped by the combobox in the right top.

For text burning it is especially important to have the Alpha Channel value (A) too, which controls the transparency (opacity). You can change it easily in this dialog by just sliding the slider.

All these burn parameters can be saved together as a set under a self-defined name and recalled at any time (the blue background marks them). In Multimedia Xpert such a set is called a Burn Instruction. At the start the name "Default" is predefined.

Burning Subtitle Files

Whole subtitle files can be burnt by just dropping them in the list of texts in the tab 'Text To Burn'. As file formats the SubRip (.srt) format (textual), MicroDVD format (.sub), Substation Alpha (.ass) and Web Video Text Tracks Format (WebVTT, .vtt) are supported which means nearly all. As a speciality many common errors inside these files will be automatically corrected. This is the same algorithm that is used in Atlas Subtitler, the sibling tool of Multimedia Xpert.

If you would like to burn subtitles for a public video like a movie, documentation or such there's a very high probability that already someone created them (depending on the language) and uploaded them to a public server on the web. You can do that in an automated way with just 2 clicks in Atlas Subtitler, another one of our tools. Just press the according button and the video pathname in the text box on the top will be handed over to Subtitler. Subtitler features some more sophisticated methods to synchronize the downloaded subtitles with the images than Multimedia Xpert. One could say that Atlas Subtitler is the expert in downloading and synchronizing subtitles while Multimedia Xpert is the expert in all other appliances.

Before burning subtitles, you should be aware that you won't do a favor to people speaking other languages. Such subtitles provoke a conflict with subtitles of other languages that are displayed at runtime. This is the reason why in Atlas Subtitler a move of the subtitle location on the screen had to be programmed. In most of the cases it's completely unnecessary and time comsuming to burn subtitles graphically into a video because nearly all of the video players are able to incorporate subtitles from a file at runtime.

Subtitle Editor

The tab 'Text To Burn' is a fully equipped Subtitle Editor. Subtitle files of formats SubRip (.srt) (textual), MicroDVD (.sub), Substation Alpha (.ass) and Web Video Text Tracks Format (WebVTT, .vtt) can be loaded.

Multimedia Xpert can automatically calculate an estimation for the duration of the subtitle by analyzing the text. If you add a new subtitle either by Drag & Drop or by entering it manually, the end time 'To' is set automatically until you enter something in the 'To' field by yourself. In general the estimated duration is quite precise and you can save yourself this step. You can also let Multimedia Xpert enter the estimation at any time later on by double clicking on 'To'. The calculation parameters for the duration can be fine-tuned in the Settings.

Subtitles can be shifted proportionally to synchronize them with the images:

As you can see you can also enter subtractions and the resulting difference will be displayed on the right side.

There are some functions available to improve subtitles before burning:

The operations are the same as in Atlas Subtitler. See the description there.

Extend: Sometimes the subtitles were dimensioned too short by the authors. You can hardly read them and they're gone again. You can fix this with the function 'Extend'. If space is limited, the length of the subtitle before and after will be adjusted if necessary. The function can also reduce the duration, but that's hardly ever needed.

For all the mass replacement operations described above you have a saved history of changes and unlimited undos and redos even over closing the app. There should not arise any fear to use these operations.

Burning an Image

You can burn a logo resp. watermark into the images for multiple purposes:

• You could mark it with your personal avatar image
• You could burn your channel logo into it
• You make it harder for other people to misuse your video for unintended purposes like infringing your copyright

In the box 'Overlay Options' you have the option to add some of the special 'overlay' options of ffmpeg.