InqScribe generates text-based subtitles for QuickTime. However, there are times when you’d prefer to have those subtitles “burned” onto your video.

• You want the subtitles to display on a video iPod, which doesn’t support text tracks.
• You want to upload subtitled video to YouTube, which ignores text tracks.
• You want subtitles to look exactly the same on Windows and Mac OS X, and don’t want to worry about font size differences.

You can use QuickTime Player (with QuickTime Pro) to accomplish this. Here’s a quick walkthrough.

1. Open the InqScribe-exported movie (we’ll call it example.mov). For this walkthrough, we’re assuming example.mov has three tracks: video, audio, and text (subtitles).
2. Select Show Movie Properties from the Window menu.
3. Select the audio track.
4. Click the Extract button to extract the audio track to a new window.
5. Save that window (we’ll call it audio_only.mov).
6. Back in the Movie Properties dialog, click Delete to remove the audio track from example.mov.
7. Use the Export command in the File menu to export example.mov (now without audio) to another format. (We’ll call this export combined.mov.) For example, you could select “Movie to QuickTime Movie” and “Broadband - Medium”. Use whatever you want for your final video encoding.
8. Open combined.mov. This movie should have one video track with visible subtitles and no sound. (The trick here is that when QuickTime Player exports a movie without an audio track, it will combine video and text tracks. It’s like Photoshop’s “Merge Down” command for combining layers.)
9. Now we need to add the audio back. Go to audio_only.mov, select all, and copy.
10. Select combined.mov, make sure the selection triangle is at the start of the timeline, and use “Add to Movie” from the Edit menu. That adds the copied audio back to combined.mov.
11. Save combined.mov.

That’s it – you’re done.

If you are targeting the video iPod, you need to be a bit careful. If, in step 7 above, you select “Movie to iPod”, your subtitles will be removed during the export. Because the video iPod can’t play text tracks, QuickTime Pro figures it’s being helpful and removes the subtitles for you.

You can workaround this by exporting to any other video format – preferably one that is significantly higher quality than iPod video.

Then, once you’ve got your combined.mov file, you just export that using the “Movie to iPod” setting, and you should be OK.