Dubbed Version
Subtitled Version
Project Overview
I subtitled and dubbed this comedy video from French into English. The video is two minutes and forty seconds long. My friend Gustavo Mercado generously contributed voice-acting talents contribution based on the transcript I provided him from the English subtitles. I picked Gustavo because he speaks French and was thus able to watch and understand the original video, which I subtitled into French using VisualSubSync. I then translated the subtitles into English, and synced Gustavo’s voice recording with the video. The video contains onscreen text, so the dubbed version of the video has a few subtitles to translate the onscreen text. I found replacement background music from audio jungle and classical music under the creative commons license. It is in Canadian French and has not previously been translated into English or any other languages. The show is called Like-Moi! and airs on Télé-Québec. I envision this as a pilot project for a US television network considering remaking the comedy series in American English with new actors. To the best of my knowledge, this has not happened, although the series has been remade in German and French from France, though this particular sketch, being from the current season, has not yet been translated.
Challenges
The actor speaks quickly, making it hard to time the dubbed audio exactly. Going from French to English helped here, as English is slightly shorter on average. Finding an appropriate voice actor could also be difficult for a comedy video, as the original actor has a very distinct style and comedic timing, but in this case Gustavo did a wonderful job.
Finding appropriate music was time-consuming, as Shazam failed to identify either of the tunes. I thus had to listen to many song clips to find ones that approximated the originals. For a commercial project there would be the added question of copyright; I am not profiting from this project in any way and I believe that this use falls under fair use for educational purposes.
I chose not to add in background noises or sound effects as I had already spent a lot of time on this project. This combined with the above-mentioned issues made it clear to me why dubbing is so much more expensive and time-consuming than subtitling; I subtitled the two-and-a-half minute video in about half an hour. The audio finding and editing took me 8 hours.
The final challenge was how to replace the original audio with the Audition audio track. I was not able to use the ffmpeg method on my computer. I tried a few video editing software applications, including Wondershare Filmora, that have free versions, but they all had massive watermarks across the screen and I didn’t like the result.
Workaround
Thanks to this article, I found out that windows has a built in video screen capture feature included with the Xbox app. It captures the whole screen with high quality video and audio. Helpfully, it doesn’t record any popups, only the application you’re in, as it was designed to record video game sessions. I tried downloading a video cropping application but it had a huge watermark too, which is why the Adobe Audition work space is visible. Many thanks to Adobe Audition for the free trial that’s actually free. As a last step, I made an SRT file that contained only the onscreen titles translated into English, then burned them in. (I realized after I had finished burning in the subtitles that I could have shrunk the Audition work space even more to only show the video, but the current result gives a good demonstration of my process.)
I have uploaded both versions, dubbed and subtitled, to my personal YouTube account. They are listed as private, meaning only people with the videos’ direct URL links will be able to see them, and they will not show up in any search results.