Your Mac is an amazing machine. Add a decent video camera and microphone and you have a competent digital video production studio.
Add a few Mac apps and your movies can have multi-lingual subtitles, scene by scene, perfect for multiple languages or for adding text over difficult to hear audio clips. How is all this accomplished? Just add the right apps.
Subtitled Movies Made Easy, Cheap
First, you need a movie or movie clips. Second, you must have a need to add subtitles to some of the movie’s scenes. Third, you need the right Mac app.
That would be Submerge or RoadMovie. The first is an inexpensive Mac app that does subtitles. The second costs a bit more but has more features.
What Submerge does is rather simple, but not easy, though all the work is behind the scenes (so to speak). It merges a subtitle file with the movie or movie clips to create a new movie with subtitles embedded.
You end up with video, the sound tracks, and the subtitles exactly where you want them to be. And, your original video remains untouched. The interface is straightforward and unencumbered by too many features.
Subtitles can be added to nearly any movie supported by QuickTime (.mov, mp4, .avi, etc), and handles a number of standard subtitle formats. Submerge has export presets for iPhone, AppleTV, iPod and iPad, and other devices.
RoadMovie is a very big brother version of Submerge which features 64-bit encoding via FFMPEG or QuickTime, subtitle file search, chapter markets, batch encoding, presets for popular devices, and easy upload to MobileMe, WebDAV, Amazon S3, YouTube or sFTP.
Both apps also support Elgato’s Turbo.264 HD add on for faster encoding.
RoadMovie also automates a number of workflow functions which can save you time.
It has AppleScript support and automatically adds movies to iTunes.
The Presets make it easy to set up and reuse many different encoding settings.
If you’re getting into video production using iMovie, Final Cut Express, or Adobe Premiere, Submerge or RoadMovie are good choices in your video production arsenal, making it easy to produce video with subtitles that are perfect for distribution, for video podcasts in multiple languages, or, to impress your friends and family members who have hearing loss.
