A lazy way to subtitle on imovie and a question regarding subtitling

[Dennis A. Amith]

Hi everyone,

I was trying to figure out ways to subtitle in English like short clips of
friends who were speaking in their foreign language and last year, I was
using Quicktime Player Pro using the cool advice Erika has on her "imovie
Solutions 2" book but I've been looking into ways of how people are
subtitling video and it seems that the PC world, there are programs that
people are using which are so darn awesome [ie. For foreign language songs,
using the font and for instance a karaoke track and the colors of that font
would lighten up during the time the word is spoken], I'm still looking for
ways for really nice, good looking ways to subtitle.

But anyway, I wanted to find a way to subtitle a piece on imovie and not
having to time everything on Quicktime Pro on a text script.

Pretty much after getting your video and audio on separate tracks, I played
the video on imovie and inserted splits on the beginning of conversation and
4.20 seconds or lower during the conversation or after the conversation has
ended.  

I inserted a subtitle and it works perfectly.  The only problem is that with
the subtitles, imovie only allows me 4.25 seconds, so for dialogue that goes
six seconds or longer, I would have to do multiple splits and guestimate how
long the subtitle will be for the video that has been split (1-4.25
seconds).  You pretty much get this down easy but anyway, just wanted to
share with people how I was able to subtitle with imovie.  Granted, it's
better to use what was mentioned in Erika's book because if you mess up or
have a typo, you can go in and fix it in the text script.  Otherwise, with
imovie, if it's saved, you can't fix it and have to do it over again, or if
you haven't saved and you may have to do numerous undos.

But it works great if you are subtitling something short in duration.
Subtitles are limited to size of font, the position of subtitle and
different colors but it's simple and quick if you want to use imovie.

A question I have for those who have Final Cut Pro or FC Express is if the
subtitling capabilities are much better.  For example, an Indie music video
in Japanese that needed to be subtitled.  With having three different
subtitles.   Having the English translation on the bottom and the Japanese
kana subtitles on top with the romanized lyrics subtitle underneath it.  So,
mainly if positioning, if effects like a karaoke effect is possible to do
with Final Cut Pro or Express?

Thanks in advance,

kndy