Synchronize Subtitles

If you just downloaded a subtitle file you can click on the blue arrow on top to take the path over. Otherwise just drag and drop an srt file from Windows Explorer into the box or right click on the file and activate "Shift Subtitles with Atlas Subtitler".

Limit shifting to a range: Here you can specify in which part of the video the shifting should occur. Leave a field empty to take the beginning resp. end of the video.

Timing Method:

There are two possibilites how the necessary time difference can be determined.

If you can write the language a little bit you can just tell Subtitler when subtitles should be displayed by entering subtitles and their correct time. Just start the video by pressing the Play button. Wait until something is spoken. Then press the pause button and look at which time index the video is now. Usually a text line of an actor is about one to two seconds long. If you subtract this from the displayed time index you will get a pretty good value for the time index. Next you enter some words of the text into the field Text near the start. At the right side Subtitler will display how many occurrences of the combination of words it finds. The words don't have to be in direct succession. Continue to enter words until you see the number 1 on the right side. A soon as the input is unique the symbol will appear instead of a . Overwrite now the time index with the one you got from the video. As a default Subtitler inserts the first unique sentence automatically if you select a subtitle file or change the limiting range. Commonly used advertisements that are sometimes placed there are skipped automatically (this list was built up by analyzing thousands of subtitle files). If you are not happy with the default you can also just let it insert the next unique one by pressing the buttonat the right side.

A second possibility to determine the time differences is by entering time differences using the built-in stop watch:

First, play the video using the Play button. Activate the subtitles in your video player and watch if the titles are in sync. If not, wait for a special word or phrase in the subtitles and press the stop watch button to start the stopwatch. Wait until the word or phrase is spoken by an actor and press the same button again. This will stop the timer and you have your difference in your input field. If the subtitles are displayed after the speaking, click on the +/- button to make the difference negative.

As an alternative it's also possible to determine the two time indices - the spoken words and the displayed subtitle - and then enter this as a difference. Example:"12:33 - 11:51".

In a second step skip the video to a position near the end of the range to shift and do the same for the input fields below. If they are in sync just leave the field empty.

When you are finished press Apply to execute the shifting of the selected range. We recommend using VideoLan Client (VLC) as video player since it can play nearly any video and is open source and freeware.

Please note that the player usually caches the subtitle files. Most likely it must be closed and reopened to view the changes. In rare cases there is even a background process that caches over the close of the player. Playing another video for a short time can help.

To correct a wrong shifting you can click on the Undo button. This will restore the previous version. You can go back until the first shifting. There is no limit in the number of restores the undo function can do. Only if you close the dialog the undos will be lost.

Use the Edit button to open the (textual) file with the subtitle timings in a text editor. We recommend Notepad++ for this. Here you can correct some mistakes in the file. Maybe you would like to upload the result to the server to help the community what we would really appreciate. Please consider that you are profiting from these people a lot.

The button Edit serves as a direct way to transfer the subtitles to the Subtitle Editor of Multimedia Xpert, another one of our tools in the video editing area. There you can edit the subtitles individually, improve them for example by making replacements and burn them into the video if necessary.

The button Explore will show the subtitle file in a Windows Explorer window.

Encoding: The processing tries to leave the character set of the subtitle file unchanged. The dropdown will automatically preselect what it thinks the character set is. If this fails, as it can be for eastern languages like Russian or Thai, you can select it manually if you get scrambled characters. But usually there will be no need for this. As a speciality Subtitler recognizes mixed western character sets automatically and corrects them.