Why Should I Upgrade to Spot 5?

We've added dozens of new features and enhancements to Spot 5 to help you organise, edit and time your subtitle files faster and more accurately than ever before. You can share your work with more people, too: we've included new export formats, a subtitle encoder engine and an optimised subtitle bitmap generator that produces probably some of the best-looking subtitles this side of Wangaratta.

Work more efficiently

• Style settings have been replaced with more powerful profiles that let you save and retrieve client parameters and display settings with a single click. Now you can store all the information for each of your clients in one place. 

• Link video files to subtitle files: the next time you open a file, the video associated with it will be opened automatically. If you choose not to link files, you'll find a handy list of recently opened videos on the video toolbar.

• Add a word to AutoReplace by simply right-clicking it. Or right-click another and get an immediate list of synonyms or spelling suggestions. Or right-click yet another and send it to one of seven customisable Web pages, including Google, Wikipedia and Babylon.

Work faster and more accurately

• The new Report View tool gives you immediate feedback on any errors in your file: you tell Spot what errors to find and Spot instantly lists them all. Report View provides exhaustive statistical information, too, allowing you to assess at a glance the overall quality of your subtitles. QCing a file has never been easier!

• To help you spot files more quickly we've added even more cue editing functions, created a zoom feature and "left/right-channel only" view for the audio waveform so an LTC signal on one channel doesn't get in the way, included an option to jump to within a certain number of frames of a shot cut rather than to the shot cut itself, and reinstated audio on fast forward.

• For those occasions when you need to subtitle an old file against a new master and the darn thing keeps drifting out of sync, we've added a proportional offset option to the Offset Cues window. You don't need to know what the original frame rate was or have a degree in maths: just select the new in time for the first subtitle in the file and click that button. For more advanced users, we've improved the Telecined Masters conversion tool and tweaked the timecode calculator to convert between SMPTE timecode formats. Whatever your technical level, Spot 5 makes converting cues a doddle.

• Fanfare, please... At last, Spot has full undo. Deleted a cue or a subtitle by mistake? Merged when you should have split? Grabbed the out cue at the wrong place in the video? Cat walked over your keyboard? No need to undo the mess manually: just hit Ctrl+Z and peace is restored. Notebook has full undo and redo, too, and now autosaves your work in the background.

• Copying subtitles from an existing file used to be a chore. Quick View now lets you open a second file and copy as many subtitles as you want to any position in the current file.

• If the WMV or MPEG file you are spotting against contains embedded timecode, there's no need to sync the file when you first open it: Spot will read the timecode straight from the file.

Share your final product with more people

• Create your own subtitled videos for client approval or to share online. You can output the finished product in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or Flash video format. Use one of six preset encoding formats or create your own: you can configure the frame rate, bitrate, bitrate mode, audio format and sampling rate of the final video, overlay BITC or a spoiler image, and output separate audio and video streams. The encoder's real-time upsampling engine intelligently resizes the source video to provide professional results even if you choose not to add subtitles but simply use the encoder as a conversion tool.

• If you haven't got time for the technical side of the encoding process, Quick Encode does it all for you at the press of a button. Just load your subtitle file, open the source video and click. It's as simple as that!

• New export formats include Final Cut Pro XML interchange bitmaps, Flash XML, digital cinema subtitles, and theatrical spotting lists. We've even added a karaoke module (14 years too late, admittedly) that does all the hard work for you: just subtitle the song and Spot will do the rest. Nice!

• Spot's subtitle bitmap generator has been optimised to produce broadcast-quality subtitles for both standard and high definition video. A combination of subsampling, interpolation and varying levels of transparency eliminates jagged edges and creates professional, highly-readable subtitles. 

Click here for a complete list of the 70 new features, enhancements and bug fixes in Spot 5.