When Editors Speak Different Languages: The Subtitle Workflow Saga

Collaborating with editors in different countries often means navigating vastly different technical workflows, and I recently stumbled into a classic example trying to subtitle a foreign language cut. My editor, based in Berlin, delivered the film in DaVinci Resolve, having done most of the picture lock there. I needed to add English subtitles and then export for a festival submission, which typically requires burned-in subs for screening.

What didn't work initially was him exporting an SRT file directly from Resolve. While Resolve can do it, the timing and formatting of his export were consistently off when I tried to import it into my own Adobe Premiere Pro sequence. Lines would be split incorrectly, or appear a frame too early/late. We wasted a day and a half troubleshooting.

What finally worked was a simpler, albeit slightly less elegant, two-step process. He exported an XML of his final sequence, and a separate, time-coded text transcription of the dialogue without any fancy formatting. I then imported the XML into Premiere Pro, creating an offline sequence from the transcription, and used the 'Create Captions from Transcription' feature. It allowed me to manually adjust timings and line breaks much more efficiently within Premiere's familiar captioning tools, before burning them in accurately.

This brute-force method saved us from Resolve-to-Premiere subtitle translation errors. It made me wonder: how are others consistently managing subtitle workflows across different NLEs, especially when dealing with multiple language tracks and tight deadlines?