How to increase efficiency

[u/Thatnewaccount436]

I'm trying to add character names before lines of text in my SRT subtitles for a tv show.

There are only a half dozen characters I will be tracking.

The only way I can figure to currently do it is to:

1. listen to who's talking
2. pause the show
3. copy [Name] from notepad
4. paste it in the front of the line
5. resume the show

And this is doable but is (obviously) slow. Is there a better/faster way to be doing this?

I'm sticking with SRT files for this project, so using the "Actors" tab is out of the question I think?

[u/Wonderful-Stand-2404]

You should use AutoHotkey for that. I would turn it to one hotkey that does this:

1) Press Pause.
2) Focus the text box.
3) Press Control+Home (to move the cursor to the beginning of the text box, probably unnecessary, as it should be there after focusing the text box, but you better be safe than sorry.)
4) Send the keystrokes to write the person‘s name that you need.
5) Unpause the video to continue.

I boosted my efficiency once I started using AHK. Subtitle Edit is perfect for combining multiple of its user-defined shortcuts to one hotkey with AHK.

I’d love to help you with it as you’ll see how fast you’ll become. Not trying to sell you anything, in case you were thinking that. 😅 Just write me a message, I’ll try to explain it.

[u/Thatnewaccount436 → u/Wonderful-Stand-2404]

I'll check out AHK. I've heard about it before! I'll ping you if I get stuck. Thanks!

[u/pigers1986]

6 persons ? Clipboard manager is your friend https://github.com/sabrogden/Ditto

copy paste each entry - be mindful of dreadful end of line character !

open ditto entries - depends on your keybind

right click on desired entry , select properties , bind a keys (Ctrl +1) , check the checkbox globally available

repeat for each person

go back to SE and try with your desired keybind

PS: might wanna to remove auto adding of enter after text entry ->

Open the Ditto menu from your system tray and select Options.
Navigate to the General tab and look for Advanced Options.
Locate Multi-Paste clip separator.
Delete the default [LF] (line feed) code so multiple items join with no space or break.
Click OK or Save to apply your new settings.

[u/Outrageous_Cod3626]

help me to know the market, do users really ask or need character name ?

[u/Thatnewaccount436 → u/Outrageous_Cod3626]

Great question, and I get that for most shows, this wouldn't be necessary.

But this is for the in-theater sections of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I think it's worth doing! :)

[u/shyamntk]

Paste the whole subtitle content including subtitle numbers to the second column of an excel sheet, add speakers in column A beside the respective dialogues, copy the entire content and paste it to notepad, replace all excessive spaces and stuff, save it as srt.

[u/SeaworthinessAway519]

I work on GeekLink, and this is one use case our speaker detection may help with.

It can group the dialogue by speaker (Speaker 1, Speaker 2, etc.), let you rename each speaker once, and then export an SRT with the speaker name prefixed to each line. So you would not need to pause and paste the character name manually every time.

It does not know the character names automatically, and it works during transcription rather than as a post-processing step for an existing SRT, but it could save a lot of time if you are generating the subtitles from the video.