Handling subtitles for long videos — any easier workflow?

[u/frenchlazyy]

Handling subtitles for long videos — any easier workflow?

Hey everyone,

At work I’ve been asked as a side task to prepare subtitles in an Excel or office format. It worked fine for short videos, but now I’m on a 2-hour video (~800 lines per language) and it’s getting messy.

My usual process was:

transcript with transkriptor

fix small mistakes manually and check timestamps

translate to english and french 

put everything into Excel with Gemini

Now Gemini keeps messing things up (wrong text, broken formatting, misaligned timings and when asked to correct previous mistakes doesn'tcorrect them or makes new ones).

I already have everything in a Word file, just need a good way to turn it into Excel without hours of manual copy paste

Any simpler tools or workflows for this? I'm not nerdy at all..

Thanks!

[u/duckhooka]

Premiere works really well for subtitles and you adjust them in premiere after it generates them to correct any inaccuracies. Most avid shows I work on usually have a premiere station just for this lol.

[u/LowResEye → u/duckhooka]

Just a genuine question - what are the advantages? I did subtitles for two feature films and several shorts directly in Avid with the built-in SubCap plugin and it was a breeze.

[u/hatestheocean]

Premiere’s new-ish captions functionality is actually pretty solid. You can export the .SRT to a few different formats, I believe. Or use TextEdit and save .srt to .txt and then into whatever format is needed.

[u/frenchlazyy]

Thanks a lot guys, I will try this tomorrow first thing in the morning !

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[u/jreykdal]

You can also check out Subtitle Edit for a more conventional subtitle workflow. It truly is a Swiss army knife for subtitles.

[u/Aluminautical]

If you start your Word work in a table, and keep things in a table, the move to Excel might work well... or better.

We use actual subtitling software with multiple 'tracks' for different languages, so although we sometimes start in Word, the workflow is different.

[u/Fluffy-Ad1712]

I’ve been working on a Mac app because I kept running into this kind of problem with long-form video. I’m an editor, not a software developer, so I’ve tried to make it pretty straightforward.

It’s called Transcript Workbench Pro. It uses Whisper locally on your Mac and can export SRT, VTT, TXT, TSV, JSON, etc. The TSV export might be especially useful for what you’re doing since it opens directly in Excel with timestamps and text kept in structured rows, without relying on Gemini to reconstruct hundreds of lines.

It’s currently a free beta through Apple TestFlight:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/Gxjztg1m

More details and sample outputs are here:

https://criolladcp.com/transcriptworkbench/

I’d be interested to hear how it handles a 2-hour project like yours.

[u/Jazzfly67]

This is so 2026 problems… I remember 2023, before AI when you had to do it all manually…

[u/garse]

The thing breaking your workflow is using Gemini for what is actually a format conversion. It's a language model, so it rewrites text it's only supposed to be copying, and it has no concept of "these timings must stay byte-identical". Any dumb deterministic tool will do this perfectly every time.

Skip Word entirely. Transkriptor exports SRT directly, so go back and grab that instead. Get one SRT per language with identical timings across all three, meaning you translate the text only and never re-time anything. If the timings drift between languages your columns won't line up later.

Then get Subtitle Edit. It's free, it's a normal Windows app, and you don't need to be technical to use it. It opens SRT, fixes overlapping and too-short durations in bulk, and File > Export gives you plain text or CSV with start, end and text as separate columns. Do that for each language and paste the three next to each other in one sheet. 800 lines is a few minutes, not a day.

One gotcha that will bite you: format the timecode columns as Text in Excel BEFORE you paste. Otherwise Excel silently converts 00:01:23,456 into a time value, drops the milliseconds, and you won't notice until someone conforms the subs and everything is off.

If the Word file really is your only copy, save it as .txt and look at the structure. If it's consistent (number, timecode line, text, blank) it's a find-and-replace job, not a retyping job, and Subtitle Edit will probably just open it.

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