Fansub Guides

Fansub Guides Timing: I. Basics of Timing in Aegisub by unanimated II. Timing without TPP + general guidelines for timing III. Additional Notes for Timing - Shifting, Line Splitting/Joining, Timing Signs, Overlapping Lines, Pasting Over, Encoding Work Raw... How to make xvid keyframes Typesetting: ASS Tags - explains all Aegisub tags Typesetting guide by unanimated Guide to using mkv tools by unanimated Guide to making chapters by RHExcelion (Just use this script instead.) Guide to using xdelta files by unanimated Aegisub: Download latest Aegisub here General Tips for Using Aegisub Scripts for Aegisub IRC guides: IRC Guide #1 by Orcus [for mIRC] IRC Guide #2 by unanimated [for KVIrc] Basics of Timing in Aegisub As you should know if you're reading this, timing subtitles is about setting start and end times to each line of a script. In essence simple enough, but there's a hell of a difference between somehow herp derp timing it and doing it right. You need to do it right. First thing to do is to download Aegisub and set it up properly (!) and become familiar with it. In order to time, you need to load video, audio, and script. A/V is easy, but with the script you can mess up. If your script is already in .ass format [and I mean for real, not just some dumbass renaming a .txt to .ass], you just Open the file, or drag it onto Aegisub. If it's a .txt or the script is on the pad, rather than Opening it, you copy the text, click on that empty line in a new script in Aegisub, and paste. You should then see a script with zeros for times. If you happen to get a script with character names, like this: Shana: Shut up! you Open it and put a colon as Actor Separator when asked. Then you should see names in the Actor field and script in the text field. Always check the whole script if you got it in this form because there might be stuff like this: Now, we don't give a fuck about the "{missing line here" in the actor field, because that field is useless; the problem is that we have "}" before Maeda, which will show on screen. So you have to delete that. The line in the script was: {missing line here: }Maeda will not ally with anyone from now on {??? TLC} Since the colon acts as separator, it got split the way you see. Aside from that, until you figure out how to load files without making mistakes, you should keep your eyes open for question marks that seem out of place, because it just might be that you failed to import a script in Unicode encoding properly, and those question marks were something else originally. We can't have that, so figure out what you did wrong and do it again right. Timing consists of Rough Timing, (TPP), and Fine Timing. Rough-Timing is where you set the start/end times on the audio track. TPP - Timing Post-Processor - is a tool that adds lead in/out, links lines, and snaps to keyframes. Fine-Timing is where you watch the video after rough-timing, looking for and fixing any errors. Rough and fine-timing takes about 20-40 minutes each, once you get some practice, which might take a few dozen episodes. Your first attempts, however, are expected to take as long as 3-5 hours, so be ready for that. TPP takes 0.0002 seconds. [Yeah, I counted them.] You may or may not wanna use TPP. Some people love it, some hate it. It's totally up to you, so try both and see. For now I'll explain stuff assuming the usage of TPP and get to timing without TPP later. Before you start timing, I recommend to use these settings: Now you just use the left mouse button to set start times and right button to set end times for each line. Pressing G applies changes and gets you to the next line. Rough timing means you set the times to the exact start and end of the audio for each line. It will look like this: Now, let's talk about all the buttons and stuff. On the right you have 3 vertical sliders. The first one zooms into the audio horizontally, 2nd one vertically, 3rd one is volume. You can click the |_| under 2 and 3 to link them together if you prefer that. The buttons under the audio... I don't actually click on any of them ever, but I use the keyboard shortcuts for some of them. First 5 are pretty useless. You just need to play/stop the audio with a key, not mouse. Go to Options-Hotkeys and set "Audio Play or Stop" to whatever key will be the most convenient for you. This will be the most used key along with G, so keep them close. This will play the audio from your current start time to end time. Next one you'll need is the one that plays 500ms after selection. Finding the start of a line is usually easy. Most of your time will be wasted on figuring out where a line ends. You can set the end far enough and play the whole thing. That will be the most reliable, but slow. You can probably start with just that, but later you'll wanna get faster. So you'll set the end to where you think it will be and play the line to check. If there's a pause before next line, it will be easy, but in a continuous dialogue you may not be sure your guess was right until you hear what's after your end time. So you use the key that plays 500ms after. And to make it even faster, once you get the hang of it, you won't wanna play the whole line each time, you just need to find the end, so you need the key for the last 500ms. You guess-set the end, use keys to play 500ms before and after it, and that should give you an idea about whether you got it right. Sometimes it may be useful to play 500ms before the start, to check you didn't miss a silent sound or something, and you may need a key shortcut for jumping to previous line if you realize you made a mistake. Rather than using default settings, figure out which of these things will be useful to you, and set the keys so that you can easily use all of them without looking at the keyboard. Another very useful thing is committing changes without jumping to the next line. Set a key for "audio/commit/stay" in Options. The button before last switches the audio to spectrum analyzer mode. Try it out, and see what works for you. Again, some timers can't work with waveform while others can't work with spectrum, so up to you to figure out which you prefer. Now you know how to rough-time. Don't forget to save often enough, though the autosave works pretty well now. When your script is rough-timed, it is far from presentable to the viewer. The subs will look like shit and will be unreadable because text will disappear too soon, lines will flicker etc. So Fine Timing and/or TPP is about fixing that. Text has to appear a little before the audio and stay on screen a little after the person is done talking, to give the viewer enough time to read. When two lines are close to one another, they should be linked together so that text doesn't disappear for just a few milliseconds, because that looks bad. We call this flickering subs. The last thing that needs to be considered is keyframes. In case you don't know, a keyframe is a frame where a scene changes in the video [like a camera cut]. If subs end just a few frames after a keyframe, it looks really bad. We call that a bleed. You need to avoid those like the plague. Basically, if anything starts or ends near a keyframe, it should be snapped to it. You can see them as the purple lines in Aegisub. However, note that these aren't always precise, so there may be scene changes that you won't see on the audio track, and you must notice those when watching the video. If you scroll up to the last picture, you'll see that 2 lines end just before a keyframe. They will have to be snapped to those keyframes. The fine-timed lines will look like this: So how do you get from rough-timed to fine-timed? Either you use TPP, then watch it and fix whatever is wrong, or, if you're not using TPP, you fine-time it in the first place, basically skipping rough-timing completely. So how to use TPP and what it does. TPP adds those lead ins and lead outs, links lines, and snaps to keyframes. The advantage is, it does that in a split second. The disadvantage is, it can actually ruin a few things, which is why many timers choose not to use it. And if you are gonna use it, you need the right settings. I've done some experiments with different settings and got the best results with roughly this: You can probably use 100 for lead in. I don't like too much lead in, so this works for me.

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