First it was movies being launched with English, Portuguese and Spanish subs. They were hard enough to A&C. Now it’s a 70-minute, 18-episode series (2 eps per week) being launched with three sets of subs. Hopefully the segments are well cut so that the A&C is straightforward. It they aren’t, this will be very intense work for a CS and his/her segmenting team with negligible reward at the end of it all. From where I sit, it seems that Viki is taking segmenters for granted right at the moment. I sincerely hope that @vikicommunity is working on fixing this so that segmenters can receive proper and fair acknowledgement for all the work and effort that goes into A&C’ing.
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Doing A&C with several language subs is so hard!
Switching a language all time and refreshing the page, it wastes so much time. A&C is okay only with English.
Please fix this @vikicommunity
Atleast ask your staff to copy paste the other language subs once the segmentors are done with A&C. That way it will make teams work with a proper deadline and easy for the seggers to do A&C.
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At this rate, nobody will want to do it. All this hassle with no gain.
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I also have a suggestion, that at the moment when a person is applying for the post of CM, he should be asked a question like “Do you know how to correctly calculate where you should cut the episodes into parts”, if he says he doesn’t know, and the staff still chooses him to be the CM, the moment that person becomes the CM, then the CS should be given the ability to cut the episode. Because if the CM knows his job why would the CS take over his part of the job? In other words, if a person who does not know his job and does not try to learn, he should not be CM.
If the CM is just a figure, he is of no use.
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I mean, there are some very good tutorials, it takes literally five minutes to learn how to do this, plus some common sense.
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That’s why I said “if he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to learn” because there are people like that.
Correct me if I’m wrong because I’m not a segmenter, now imagine the situation, the segmenters will certainly work in English, and the drama has been translated into 3-4 languages, if there are any segments that need to be (cancelled or combined with the previous ones) all these other languages will lose a part of the translation that was eventually done.
Correct me if I’m wrong because I’m not a segmenter, now imagine the situation, the segmenters will certainly work in English, and the drama has been translated into 3-4 languages, if there are any segments that need to be (cancelled or combined with the previous ones) all these other languages will lose a part of the translation that was eventually done.
right, so it is. but normally the adjustments should be done, before the other languages works on the channels.
if changes has to be made again later, the CM must inform the OL to chck the new segments
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From a segmenting perspective, if the only adjustments that are needed involve fixing the start time of the segment or modifying its length, then it doesn’t matter how many languages are present in the subs.
On the other hand, if smaller segments need combining into a larger segment, then the segmenter has to go through each of the languages present and combine each language. If this doesn’t happen, subs in other languages will be lost. Similarly, if a segment is too long and it needs splitting into two, the segmenter needs to consider each individual language. In the case of splitting segments, though, no information is lost the segmenter only works with the English subs. I hope that this helps explain things a little bit 
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Then there is still the problem that the potential CM might either lie or miscalculate their own abilities. A first-time CM can only estimate what it will be like. I’ve had a CM tell me they knew how to do it and then they ended up using the automatic function… 
And even if their cuts are not totally bad, the CS might still see a reason to make some changes.
I’ve encountered a CM who messed up after thorough explanation and then when I gave up and gave the timestamps instead, they still messed up… 
Yes, but instead of burdening the segmenters with the task of saving the subs for all languages instead of only English during A&C, someone (CM, respective mods, CS, whoever) can copy all subtitles from the bulk translation and save them into a file before the segmenting takes place.
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This drama comes with 3-4 languages already done, so imagine what a mess it will be if segments have to be changed and edited. Only then comes CE and its changes. We will have to wait much longer for the drama to be done than if everything went as before, for the segmenters to segment, and for the English team to do their work, and once it is finished, it will be in the hands of the OL.
What would be the correct way to estimate the timestamps for parts?
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You start with the idea that each part should be around ten minutes. But you also look at the total length of the episode, so that they are well distributed, so it might become a little more or a little less (usually more). For instance, 1 hour episode = 6 parts. 2 hour film = 10-12 parts.
Then you go to the segment timer, where you think the cut should be made, and take care not to cut in the middle of someone speaking, or just after, without leaving a little bit of an extension, usually 1 second (because the viewer must have the time to read the subtitle). You adjust, figure out where you want it, write it down somewhere (I use a Notepad file). Then go to the next etc. When you have them all written down, you go to Manage and mark everything, being careful to add the extra zeroes for milliseconds etc.
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Statistically speaking, there will be, every now and then, an incapable person who is too proud to admit their inadequacy. These things happen, but are they frequent enough that rules should be made based on them, or are they the exceptions?
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I have documents with extensive explanations, but basically you would:
- Decide into how many parts you want to cut and calculate how long those parts would approximately be. The common length is about ten minutes, but you can decide on whatever you see fit. (There are also people who cut according to the number of segments, but I’m not one of them.)
- If you are comfortable with the segment timer, go to the segment timer; otherwise, play the video instead. The segment timer is the easiest and gives the most precise timings, but you wouldn’t want to end up accidentally deleting any segments so for some people, it’s better to use the video instead.
- Fastforward to where your cut would ideally be. If at that timestamp, there are people talking or singing, or there is on-screen text, search for a timestamp closeby where nothing is being said, sung or written. Take into account that speaking and singing should get an extension of 1 to 1.2 seconds and that text should have gone completely out of sight before you cut.
If you do this in the segment timer (with presubs), you can easily search for a place without a segment, but in that case, you still need to check whether there SHOULD be a segment and whether the segment right before it has an extension or not. - When you find a timestamp, fill it in at the Manage page (00:00:00.000) and click on “add.”
Now go search for your next timestamp. Don’t make a cut for the last part: if you want 10 parts, you make 9 cuts. Otherwise, you’ll end up with an empty part at the end.
Once you have made all cuts, click on the blue save button on the Manage page. Open or refresh the segment timer (or the subtitle editor if it’s already unlocked) and you will see your freshly-cut parts.
I think the best change would be for Viki to abolish the automatic-cutting button. Many CMs use it either because they really don’t know how to cut parts or because they don’t want to put in the effort. We all know the results of automatic cutting…
So let’s let the CMs make an effort to do it themselves (after explanation) and see how many still mess up before we take more drastic measures.
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Could you share them with me?
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This is how a colleague taught me, and after cutting you always have to check if it was done well.
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I agree with that!
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What I have done in the past is give the timings where the video should be divided to the CM with instructions. Fortunately I have never had a CM who didn’t understand the directions I gave.
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That means the directions were great, although of course, as I said, there will always be people who don’t understand no matter what.
I have two, no three friends who are so adverse to technology you wouldn’t believe it. They always call me about their computer problems, which they cannot even describe properly, and at the end of the phone call I’m ready to burst crying from frustration, because they just won’t understand!.
- “Just click the button on the upper right corner”
- “There’s no button on the upper right corner”.
Turns out they were looking at another window.
In all other matters they are normal people, with a normal intelligence. I believe they just hate computers, so they have a subconscious psychological refusal to learn anything about the whole matter. They use a PC because they like doing certain things like watching videos on YouTube, sending mails or browsing Facebook, or the news, but that’s about it. You can’t even teach them how to copy-paste.
But the problem with the CM in the example cited above was not that she didn’t know or didn’t understand (this is normal after all), but that she refused to acknowledge that she didn’t know and ask for help. This is so ignorant and arrogant. What’s wrong with not knowing something? Nobody is born knowing how to cut videos in parts, we all had to learn it at some point.
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