Did you know that there is an easy way to automatically add subtitles in DaVinci Resolve?

This is a simple tutorial that will save you a lot of time and energy when editing your videos.

You will need:

• Microsoft Word or similar program,
• Notepad or similar program
• Davinci Resolve
• The subtitles your professor gave you

Step 1
Open Editor/Notepad or a similar program.

Step 2
Open the subtitle file with Microsoft Word or a similar program.

Step 3
Copy the subtitles and the associated timestamps.

Step 4
Paste the text you have copied into Editor/Notepad (or a similar program) and change the format of the text and associated timestamps. In this screenshot, you can see how the correct format should look like.

Step 5
When you are finished, save the file as a .srt file.

(SRT is short for SubRib Text, a format for subtitles)

Step 6
Open DaVinci Resolve.

Step 7
Insert the associated video into the video editing track.
Add a Subtitle Track by right-clicking the editing track and selecting “Add Subtitle Track”.

Step 8
Click File -> Import -> Subtitle…Select the .srt file you created earlier.

Step 9
Once you have imported the .srt file, you can find it as part of your project’s current Media Pool (in this screenshot it’s the file on the left)

Step 10
Now do a right-click on the .srt-file in your Media Pool.
Click “Insert Selected Subtitles to Timeline Using Timecode”.

If done correctly, the subtitles should now automatically appear on the Subtitle Track.

The timestamps should already be aligned with their associated time and place of the video.

Seconds vs Frames
You might have noticed that the timestamps from the .srt file and the timestamps from Davinci Resolve look different.

However, this is due to the fact that .srt files measure time in actual seconds and milliseconds, whereas Davinci Resolve measures time in frames.

For example: The first sentence has a timestamp from 00:00:00,000 –> 00:00:01,270.
The Davinci Resolve subtitle block for this sentence ends at 00:00:01:08.

Calculation
But how do we know for sure that 00:00:01,270 and 00:00:01:08 are basically the same?
If we subtract the one second of 00:00:01,270 and 00:00:01:08, we get00:00:00,270 and 00:00:00:08 respectively. This means that 270 milliseconds should be equal to 8 frames. We can do a quick calculation to check if this is correct. 

• One second is 1000 milliseconds.
• The video has 29.97 frames per second (Davinci Resolve uses 29.97 fps instead of 30 fps)
• We want to find out how many milliseconds a single frame has and find out how many milliseconds 8 frames have.
• We need to devide 1000 by 29.97 and then multiply the result by 8.

• (1000/29.97) * 8
• 1000/29.97 = 33,3667000333667
• 33,3667000333667 * 8 = 266,9336002669336
• 266,9336002669336 ≈ 270 [milliseconds]

Other tips for your project

Did you know…

• …that you can adjust your code in Visual Studio Code to perfectly fit into your view area? Click View -> Word Wrap or simply press Alt + Z.
  
• …that you can automatically format your code and make it more beautiful?
  Select your code and press Alt +Shift + F (Windows),
  Shift + Option + F (Apple/Mac) or
  Ctrl + Shift + I (Linux)