Putting subtitles in video

Recently, our new VIP graduate student member Henry Lee, Jr. started a machine learning course in our lab. Some of our alumni like Francis and BA expressed interest in attending but couldn't come. So upon Francis' suggestion we took a video of Henry's lecture.

Pizza to go with the lectures. Photo by Elexis Mae Torres.

The video turned out great but the audio was terrible. I'm sure going to buy a directional microphone for the succeeding lectures but for the meantime I thought of annotating his talk by putting subtitles to the video. So onto Google to search for a subtitle editor.

Surprisingly, every forum I read recommended Subtitle Edit, a free, open source software to do just that.  So I tried it.

First, our movie was captured by an HD Panasonic video camera and the file format is .MTS. The lecture ran a little over an hour so the video file came out in two files, the first set was 4GB the second 1.4GB. I converted the MTS file into MP4 using Avidemux (oh, that's another topic. The proper setting can be found here.).

At first the file won't open in SE, its error message says the video codecs are not around. It suggested a link for downloading codecs. I just clicked and installed away and Voila! MP4's now open.

The SE interface is very easy to use. Five stars. And I've started adding subtitles.

Le Subtitle Edit interface.

But into the 50th second of the video I got lazy, so the complete annotations will have to wait for another day. Meanwhile, we will just have to wear earphones when we watch the video.