These guidelines are for people familiar with SDH captioning and provide a short addition to our standard transcription guidelines to understand what’s expected when captioning SDH at Happy Scribe.

Any SDH project at Happy Scribe requires the same proofreading as with non-SDH subtitling, with the addition of:

• Dialogue specifications
• Atmospherics
• Speaker labelling
• Music notation

Technical requirements

Technical requirements are:

• 42 characters per second (CPL)
• 2 lines of subtitle, with preferably the top subtitle being shorter (but give preference to proper line breaks)
• 20 characters per second (CPS)
  • Stretch subtitle by 12 frames or 0.5 seconds past their original out-time to improve CPS.
  • Truncate subtitle by slightly simplying speech (only sparsely do this).
  • Allow CPS to reach 23 CPS as a last resort. No subtitle may reach a higher number.
• Subtitles should last at least 1 second and max. 7 seconds. Atmospherics should never last longer than 3 seconds, even if the sound they describe may be longer.
• All subtitles have a mandatory subtitle gap of at least 2 frames between each other (this is force-enabled).
• Ensure all subtitles are snapped to shot changes according to the requirements (this is force-enabled, but some automatic subtitles may need adjustments to snap).

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If other presets are specified by the style guide, be sure to follow those presets instead.

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Review the Transcription and Subtitles Guidelines for language-specific items and for an order of priorization in subtitle formatting.

Dialogue

• Dialogue should captured as per normal subtitling standards, but unlike clean-read should include a selected amount of verbatim cues:

  • Filler words (offset by commas).

  1	Mais, genre, l'avez-vous envisagé ?
  2	Donc, alors, oui, c'est comme vous voulez.

  • False starts of 3+ words (separated with an ellipsis).

  1	Il avait pris des…
  2	Il est parti en vacances le mardi.

• Atmospherics that interrupt dialogue should be preceded and succeeded by ellipses.

  | 1 | J'ai juste… [soupire lourdement] | | --- | --- | | 2 | …besoin d'un gros câlin. |

Atmospherics