One project I didn't talk about in my blog but I'm very proud of is Skywind. Skywind is a total conversion mod, a video game modification that aims to recreate from scratch the video game Morrowind into the more modern Skyrim game engine (Skyrim itself is the 5th installment of the same saga as Morrowind).
But enough with the introductions: in one of the latest videos I had the pleasure to subtitle, we explore how the Iron Armor design was changed and refreshed to have a more modern look.
*Enable Italian subtitles to experience the final result!
In this case, the workflow was my regular for subtitles, which entails the same care I use when facing any commercial project (Skywind is a non-commercial one), of course. It first starts with downloading the video, its subtitles, title, and description from the channel page, then importing Title & Description in a single document as plain text in memoQ.
For the subtitles - in this case an SRT format - I made use of the SRT subtitle filter built-in in memoQ. Here though, I used a self-customized flavor of it that's already set up for Netflix standards: 42 characters per line (CPL). I also set memoQ to put the line break as the inline tag. The reason for this is twofold:
It allows me to check the characters per each line, and move around the tag as it's the line break itself, within the subtitle event;
I can also remove it if the translation is so short that it doesn't require any line break (it sometimes happens!)
Once the files are imported into memoQ, I can translate them with the usual professionalism and attention to detail. A good round of spell-check and QA and we have the translation ready to be exported.
After exporting the SRT files, in particular, I adopt another process to make sure it's 'Netflix-level QAed'. I open the subtitle file in Subtitle Edit, a free, open-source subtitling software, which comes with a handy Netflix QA auto-checklist.
After opening the file in Subtitle Edit, I will create the audio wave by clicking the spectrogram pane (this might result in the tool downloading the required component first). When the audio wave is ready, we can generate the shot changes from the toolbar > Video > Generate/import shot changes, and hit Generate shot changes with FFmpeg (again, this component might need a separate download we can do in-tool).
Now that we have also detected our shot change (with more or less accuracy based on the sensitivity parameter, which by default I recommend to 0.40), we're good for the Netflix QA: toolbar > Tools > Netflix quality check.
I make sure to select my target language (Italian in this case) to use the appropriate QA ruleset. We can then proceed to fix all the issues that the Netflix QA highlighted.
When we hit the Netflix quality check entry menu next time, it should notify us that no more issues are found. Now the translation is ready to go live on YouTube!
I hope you enjoyed this different type of blog post!
Credits to Orkhan Julfa for the thumbnail.
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