Overdub takes a caption file that is already timed and returns one SRT, one WebVTT and one plain transcript per language — plus a cue-by-cue CSV and a zip of the lot.
Nothing opens in this browser — this one takes a job and does the work on our own graphics cards in Oregon. The free allowance below is how you try it: 150 cue translations, no card and no payment, on the key you are issued.
Every timestamp is copied byte for byte off your own file. It needs a file that is already timed and will not take audio or video.
The problem
Look at where the visitors come from and a good share of them are reading a language your catalogue is not in. Captioning for them is not a translation problem so much as a bookkeeping one: the same title in seven languages is twenty-one files that all have to stay in sync with one original, and the moment somebody retimes the English the other six are quietly wrong.
Timestamps are copied from your own file, never recalculated. Seven languages come back in sync with each other and with the original, because they all carry the same times.
Three files per language — SRT, WebVTT, plain transcript — plus a cue-by-cue CSV across all languages and a zip of everything, so a translator can be given one spreadsheet to check.
Audio and video are refused. There is no speech model on our machines, which is also why your footage never comes near them.
Overdub translates cues. It does not create them. Give it a plain transcript and it stops before anything runs, naming the reason — because the alternative is estimating timings from word counts in a language whose words are a different length, which produces captions that drift worse in the translation than they did in the original.
How it works
An SRT or VTT. Clean it with Dialogue first if the cue splitting is rough — a bad split translated seven times is seven bad splits.
One job, many languages. Priced per language-minute, so three languages over a twenty-minute title is sixty units and you can see that arithmetic before you commit.
Files per language for the players, and one cue-by-cue CSV with every language side by side — which is the file you hand a native speaker when you want a hundred cues spot-checked.
What it will never do
Translation is the step where a studio most often ends up uploading its work to a stranger. Overdub is shaped so that never has to happen.
Pricing
One cue in one language is one unit. A two-hundred-cue scene in five languages is a thousand units, and that arithmetic is shown before the job runs rather than after. The free 150 is deliberately enough to do one short title in two languages and judge the output properly.
A short title in two languages, start to finish.
A working catalogue opened to several markets.
A library taken into every market at once.
Flat per cue translation. Re-running one language after a correction charges only that language's cues. Your licence key is emailed to you within two working days of payment.
Checkout is our own bitcoin server, not a card processor. The units you buy are added to your key: buy from the Buy more box inside the program and they arrive on their own once the payment confirms, or buy here and paste the invoice number from your receipt into that box.
Questions
For search and accessibility, usually. For marketing copy or anything a lawyer would read, no.
That is why the cue-by-cue CSV exists. Hand it to somebody who speaks the language, have them read a hundred rows, and you will know which languages you trust unreviewed and which you do not. A vendor who tells you machine translation needs no review is telling you what you want to hear.
Because we will not hold your work, and there is nowhere to put it.
Time it in your editor, or run the rough export through Dialogue first. Both of those happen on your side of the wall and that is the point.
Re-run the job. The translations are keyed to the times in the file you sent, so a retimed original is a new file.
This is honest rather than convenient. The alternative — translations that quietly keep their old times — is the bug that makes multi-language captioning miserable.
The ones the model on Tower 1 handles well, and it will tell you plainly which those are rather than offering a list of ninety and doing forty of them badly.
A key. One line of text, issued to you and shown exactly once — only its hash is kept here, so it cannot be looked up later and we could not tell you what yours is. Every key arrives with a free allowance already on it, which is the tier at the top of the pricing above, and the work starts the first time you send a job with that key on it.
Each job is metered in the unit named in the pricing, and a unit that fails — a file that will not read, a row the model held back — is not charged and is named in the job report rather than silently skipped. When an allowance runs out the next job is refused before any work starts, with the number it used printed on the refusal.
More units are bought in bitcoin. The checkout is a bitcoin server we run ourselves. Buy from the Buy more box inside the program and the units are added to your key on their own as soon as the payment confirms; buy from the plan buttons above and paste the invoice number from your receipt into that same box. Each payment adds its units once, to one key.
Send one title in two languages and read the cue CSV. That one file tells you whether this is publishable for your market or needs a reviewer, which is the only question worth answering first.