Happiness7472 wrote:
The video is in 23.97 FPS so it is a drop frame video?
[…] now the subtitles at the end are starting to desync or shift. The subtitles at the beginning are totally fine but then get gradually worse at the end. I suspect this has something to do with the frame rate or the drop frames, but I'm very confused here and don't really know how to fix it.
I have tried changing everything, from changing the FPS to changing it to non-drop rate, but nothing seems to be working.
Is there something I can do to fix it?
Yes, you are correct. This is a clear case of FPS mismatch between the video and the subtitle file. Another possibility is that the subtitles were simply poorly timed. To verify, you can try to see at what frame a subtitle cycles per second. So, if it advances to 1 second after frame 23, then it should match with the video FPS. In that case, the subtitle file was not very well created.
As I recall, in Subtitle Edit you can adjust the timing partially. You'd only need to match the timing to the video only in problematic sections, and leave the rest alone. Selecting a certain range would let you do this process en masse. Aegisub may have this feature as well. If it doesn't, I'm sure there are automation scripts you can use for this.
CroPro wrote:
[…] none of this technical overhead that should be someone else's department anyway.
You would need to deal with these if you work with direct clients. They're not particularly savvy about subtitling, hence why they hired you since the first place. I'm sorry for the elitism, but you don't get to call yourself a subtitler if you don't know the technicalities of timed-text production and presentation. Of course, linguistics excellence is paramount to this profession. I won't deny that. But quality subtitling goes beyond just a matter of interlingual transfer accuracy. A perfect translation is useless if the viewers are having troubles in reading what is written on the screen.
[Edited at 2023-01-21 04:04 GMT]