It had been a long time since I published any article related to subtitles, so it’s not bad to review some tools for embedding them in videos, which is still necessary for festival distribution.
When we begin distribution, it is very important to have all materials well prepared. In the case of screening and viewing videos, we should already have them with English subtitles both in .srt format and embedded.
We will also need the videos for programmer viewing in a medium size, either to download them easily or to upload them to the festivals’ own platforms (such as Locarno and Berlin).
In these cases, both to generate a video with a size around 500 MB and to embed subtitles, I usually use HandBrake. A program that works very well, is free, cross-platform (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux), and since its latest version, 0.10.5, allows embedding subtitles from an SRT—what more could you ask for?
For Ubuntu/Linux users, I recommend installing it with the .deb package from the Launchpad website and not from the repositories. I don’t quite understand it, but the latest version available in Ubuntu only allows exporting in .mkv and not in .mp4.
To create these videos, I usually go from full HD 1080p to standard HD, 720p, as it allows us to maintain acceptable quality while considerably reducing the file size, which is what we’re interested in.
Let’s see how to easily embed subtitles and reduce the file size:
First, I load the video by clicking the Source button. In Destination, I can rename it and choose the folder where to save it on my computer. We can already see it with the .mp4 extension (HandBrake can export in .mp4, .m4v, and MKV).
Before loading the subtitles, we are going to convert this video from full HD to standard HD. To change the options, go to Picture.
In the Storage Geometry option, we can modify the width and height of the video. In this screenshot, it should show 1920 x 1080, but HandBrake automatically applies cropping of the black areas, which is why the measurements are not exact.
To modify it, I change the width to 1280 and the height adjusts automatically to preserve the proportions.
Now we are going to embed the subtitles. Go to the Subtitle List option and click Add.
A window will open where I can select the SRT subtitle that I will have saved on my computer and choose the language. For the subtitle to be embedded in the video, I must check the Burn into video option.
If everything goes well, we will see the SRT subtitle ready in the lower box.
We now have everything ready. Click Start and the video encoding to standard HD with the embedded subtitle will begin.
Here we see it in full operation:
To carry out this encoding, we have used by default the Normal setting that we can see on the right side of the window, and which works very well, maintaining good video quality.
We must also keep in mind that the .srt format is plain text and does not contain information about font types and sizes. HandBrake itself has a format that it applies by default to subtitles and which we cannot change.
As we can see, embedding subtitles in a video and reducing the size a bit can be done easily, maintaining quality and creating a lightweight file to upload to festival platforms.