Adventures in Subtitling

2026-07-06

I’ve been wanting to share this clip but haven’t because it didn’t have captions. Fifteen? years ago I did a little subtitling work for Ascalon Films and Fun Yet Films (RIP) and it was pretty painful.

because who wouldn’t!

I transcribed the audio, then used a program to generate the time code file (.srt) and then used Final Cut Pro to lay in the captions, adjusting the start/stop times as well as the transcription itself to follow the pace of the speaker. Then render the video and check it over… It took FOR.EV.ER.

Things have improved significantly in the time since I last looked at doing this. First, AI transcription. For me AI is a tool that can take over the boring stuff, like transcribing and timecoding a video. I used MacWhisper at the free level and it worked really well. Once it had the text, I exported the .srt.

Then I brought the video clip and the .srt file together into Subler and rendered it using the default settings and…

I had to edit the .srt to add the sound effect. But other than that… I’m so pleased with how this turned out!