Quicktime subtitles

CFlatow cflatow at optonline.net
Sun Dec 28 13:35:44 PST 2003


I'm trying to add subtitles to a Quicktime movie.
I'm following the instructions in Apple's book "Quicktime for the Web" 
(3rd edition) where it says that if I create my text in TextEdit as 
unformatted text, then the carriage returns will define the 
distribution of the text into separate frames.

The book refers me to a utility called MacAW, which is supposed to 
allow me to distribute my text frames to the appropriate video frames.

Problem #1 is that when I follow the instructions in MacAW 1.4 and I 
hit the "mark sync" button, it highlights ALL of my text, rather than 
just the first line as I expect. Therefore I can't use it to distribute 
the various phrases in the appropriate places.

Next I try to add a text track manually in QT (6.5) Pro. According to 
the instructions in the book I may either drag my text file and drop it 
over the movie controller or use the Import command to import the file. 
I was expecting these two options to be alternate ways of achieving the 
same result: creating a black bar at the bottom of my movie with the 
various frames of text.

Uh-Uh. No go.
When I drag and drop the text file it gives me a little black box in 
the upper left of the movie, and what's worse, it appends those text 
frames (which, at least it has distributed as I expect, based on the 
carriage returns) to the beginning of the movie.

When I use the import command method instead, it just creates a new 
movie with the text frame sequence.

If I copy all those frames and "Add Scaled" it pasted those frames into 
the upper corner of my movie, covering the original video content.

So I finally just copy the text from the text file and "Add Scaled" . 
VOILA!
I get what I kinda expected, but now I need to format the text!

So the book says to "Export" the text track "Text to Text" with 
descriptors.
Unfortunately, the file produced does NOT contain my text!!!
It contains only the text formatting descriptor tags!

Can anyone help me with this???

TIA
Carl



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