subtitling

[Jasper Sharp]

Premiere is perfectly adequate for the process. Admittedly you have to spend
the time typing in the subtitles in the first place, but this is going to be
a problem in any case.
I have a full version of Premiere, so I'm not sure what features are
disabled on demo copies, but I imagine that basic functionality such as
image capture and titling should be there. As for degraded image quality, I
think at worst you would lose a generation. I'm currently making a brief
documentary using clips taken from VHS releases, and the quality is fine - a
little blocky, but the colours are still retained. 
The only major consideration is to make sure you have a big enough hard
drive to hold 90minutes of video data: you're looking at a minimum of 10gb.




2: it takes a lot of equipment -- Avid editors are not cheap! Even using Sub
Station Alpha requires a genlock and the results aren't that impressive.
3: it's extremely time consuming. I looked at using Premiere to make
subtitles -- perhaps there's other, specialist, software.
4: digitizing a VHS tape, adding subtitles, then recording back to VHS
degrades the image 	quality.
5: once done, the subtitles aren't modifiable without going over the whole
process.
6: Europe and the USA (and Japan etc) use different VHS standards.