Subtitling Your Film for Festival Submission and Screening

What festivals commonly ask for, stage by stage

Subtitle requirements tend to follow the life of a submission. The details below are common patterns, not rules; read each festival's current regulations and technical specifications before you export anything.

Submission screener

Usually an online screening link or a file. Non-English dialogue is commonly expected to carry English subtitles, often burned in

Selection and programming

Some festivals ask for a dialogue list or subtitle file at this point for their own translators or for a second subtitle language

Exhibition copy

A cinema package (DCP), a high-quality video file or a tape-free equivalent, with subtitles either burned into the picture or carried as a separate subtitle track

Second-language screenings

Festivals in non-English-speaking countries may add local-language subtitles, sometimes projected separately from the picture

Press and online platforms

A separate SRT or similar file is often requested for online screenings and press libraries

Two things are almost universal. Programmers need to understand every word, so a screener with missing or rough subtitles makes a weak first impression. And once a film is selected, the technical team will tell you exactly which formats they accept, frequently with a deadline that falls weeks before the screening.

Burned-in screeners versus separate subtitle files

Burned-in subtitles are rendered into the picture during export. They always display, on any player, exactly as you designed them. That reliability is why many festivals prefer them for screeners: nobody has to remember to switch subtitles on, and the font and placement survive the trip through a screening platform. The downside is that a mistake means re-exporting and re-uploading the whole film.

A separate file, usually SRT, is a sidecar that the player loads alongside the video. It can be corrected in minutes and swapped without touching the picture, and it lets a festival show the film with or without subtitles. The trade-off is that styling depends on the player, and an upload platform may reject a file with a formatting slip. The general difference between the two approaches is explained in open vs closed captions.

Many filmmakers keep both: a master SRT as the editable source of truth, and a burned-in screener exported from it. Corrections go into the SRT first, so the two never disagree.

Subtitles inside a cinema package

A Digital Cinema Package is the set of files cinemas and many festivals project from. Subtitles in a DCP are typically stored as an XML subtitle track that the cinema server renders over the picture, with fonts either referenced or embedded in the package. There are two families of DCP, often called Interop and SMPTE, and they use different subtitle formats, so a subtitle track made for one does not automatically work in the other. Subtitles can also be burned into the DCP picture, which avoids the rendering question entirely but locks them in.

DCP mastering tools, both free and commercial, can usually import an SRT and convert it into the right subtitle track, which is another reason to keep a clean, correctly timed SRT as your master. If a festival asks for a DCP and you have never made one, budget for a test on a real cinema server or ask whether a high-quality file is accepted instead.

Building the subtitle master from your dialogue

There are two starting points. If you have a locked script or a dialogue list, you can translate from text and time it to the picture. If the film was improvised, documentary or heavily changed in the edit, the script no longer matches what is said, and starting from the audio is more accurate.

Either way, the work runs in this order:

1. Lock the picture. Subtitles timed to a cut that later changes will drift at every edit point.
2. Produce a source-language transcript of every line of dialogue, including lines that are hard to hear.
3. Translate the transcript into the target language, keeping meaning, register and character voice rather than word-for-word equivalence.
4. Time each subtitle to the speech it translates, so it appears with the line and leaves with it.
5. Divide long lines into readable cues of one or two lines, breaking at natural phrase boundaries.
6. Have a fluent reviewer check the translation against the picture, then fix timing and spelling.
7. Export the SRT master, then derive the burned-in screener and any DCP subtitle track from it.

Hand-editing the file, from fixing words to shifting timing, is covered step by step in how to edit an SRT file.

Translation review by a fluent reviewer

A festival audience will judge your film partly through its subtitles, and jurors may include native speakers of both languages. A machine draft can save hours of typing and timing, but it is a draft. Names, slang, jokes, swearing, cultural references and lines that rely on tone are exactly where machine translation tends to go flat or wrong, and they are often the lines that define a character.

Ask a reviewer who is fluent in the target language, ideally one who also understands the source language, to watch the film with the subtitles on rather than reading the file alone. Give them the script or transcript, a list of character names and invented terms, and notes on anything deliberately ambiguous. Where to find such a person and how to brief them is covered in finding a reviewer for AI translation.

Timing and readability on a big screen

A cinema screen changes how subtitles feel. Viewers sit further away relative to the image height, their eyes travel further between faces and text, and a subtitle that seemed fine on a laptop can feel rushed or crowded when projected.

• Keep cues to one or two short lines. Long single lines force the eye across a very wide screen.
• Give each subtitle enough time on screen. Reading speed limits and how cue duration relates to text length are explained in subtitle timestamp alignment.
• Avoid subtitles that flash up for a fraction of a second; merge fragments into a cue the audience can actually read.
• Respect cuts where practical. A subtitle that hangs over a hard cut into a new scene is distracting on a large screen.
• Check placement against burned-in titles and lower thirds, and check legibility over bright skies, snow and white walls.

The spotting rules are covered in subtitle timing guidelines. Before delivery, watch the subtitled film on the largest screen you can access.

Planning around festival deadlines

Subtitle work expands to fill whatever time is left, and festival deadlines rarely move. Work backwards from the submission date:

• Picture lock several weeks before the deadline, so subtitles are timed to the final cut.
• A first translated draft within days of lock, leaving most of the time for review rather than typing.
• At least one full review screening with a fluent viewer, then a second pass after fixes.
• Exports and uploads well before the deadline, since screening platforms can take time to process large files and may flag subtitle errors.
• A separate plan for the exhibition copy, because a selection notice can arrive with a tight delivery window.

Name every version with the film title, language, cut and date, so the file in the exhibition package is the reviewed one.

Common mistakes and festival-specific risks

• Timing subtitles before picture lock, then shipping a version that drifts after the final trim.
• Sending the screener with burned-in subtitles and a separate SRT that no longer match.
• Relying on an unreviewed machine translation for dialogue that carries the film's humour or emotion.
• Assuming every festival accepts the same formats; one may want burned-in English, another a separate file, a third a DCP subtitle track.
• Ignoring encoding. A file saved in a legacy text encoding instead of UTF-8 can show broken accents or empty boxes on a festival system, especially for languages with non-Latin scripts.
• Forgetting songs and on-screen text. Decide early whether lyrics, signs and text messages need subtitles, because they are often the lines festivals query.

Where mydubly fits in a festival workflow

mydubly can produce the first draft of a timed subtitle file from your film's dialogue. You choose the video file from your device, the spoken language is detected automatically, and the job returns SRT and VTT files plus plain and timestamped transcripts. If you choose a target language, the subtitle file is in that language and you also get the transcript in both languages, which is useful for the reviewer. The subtitle generator handles films up to 2 hours per file; a longer feature would need to be split. The video picture stays on your device, and only compressed audio is sent for recognition.

Be clear about what you get. Each cue is one recognized speech segment on a single line, with no italics, positioning or styling, and only speech is subtitled, so songs, signs and text on screen need adding by hand. mydubly does not burn subtitles into the picture and does not create DCPs or cinema subtitle tracks. Treat its file as a starting point to review, split into two-line cues and correct in a subtitle editor before export.

Cost is small next to the review time. A 14-minute short costs 14 credits (1.4¢) for transcripts and subtitles, and a 95-minute feature costs 95 credits (9.5¢).

Next step: make a reviewed master file

Pick the festival you are most likely to submit to first and note its exact subtitle requirements for screeners and exhibition copies. Then create a timed draft of your locked cut, have it reviewed by a fluent viewer on a big screen, and save the corrected SRT as your master. The guide to adding subtitles to a video covers getting that file onto a player or platform, and every burned-in or cinema version can be derived from the same reviewed source.