Category Archives: movie subtitling

Digital Movie Subtitles and XSLT

Turns out that digital movie subtitles are kept in an XML file. There’s time code, a couple of font elements, and there’s a subtitle element that contains the text. ghastly, but I suppose it works.

Well, most of the time. Something had happened with the English subtitles to the festival opening feature, Avalon. A test run revealed that every subtitle was included twice, one set with Font Id “Arial” and another with font Id “Arial0”.

Fixed this with an XSLT script, marking the first time I’ve used XSLT in my work as a projectionist.