Your documentary took months, sometimes years. The subtitles should reflect that same care. Hello8 combines AI speed with human precision to preserve your narrative voice in every language.
Documentary filmmaking presents subtitling challenges that generic tools aren't built to handle.
Documentaries feature real people speaking naturally, with accents, dialects and overlapping speech that generic engines flatten.
Interviews reference local customs, historical events, and cultural expressions that require careful translation to preserve meaning.
Panel discussions, crowd scenes, and overlapping dialogue need precise speaker identification and timing.
Submission windows are tight. You need fast turnaround without sacrificing the quality that judges and audiences expect.
Every feature is designed around the real needs of documentary filmmakers and post-production teams.
AI handles the initial transcription across 90+ languages. Your editors then work the track in our studio, several at once, with changes syncing live.
Translations that go beyond word-for-word. Our editors ensure cultural references, idioms, and colloquialisms are adapted for the target audience.
Automated checks on reading speed, line breaks, typographic conventions and timing. Reading speed is yours to set per project; typographic rules follow the language.
Frame-accurate subtitle timing that respects your editorial rhythm. Subtitles appear and disappear in sync with dialogue and scene cuts.
Export in SRT, VTT and ASS as sidecar files, or subtitles burned into the video with the font embedded so it renders identically on any machine.
Generate videos with permanently embedded subtitles for festival screeners and social cuts, with the font travelling inside the file.
Drag and drop your video file. We support all major formats up to feature-length.
Our AI generates an accurate base transcription and translates into your target languages.
Your team reviews the track in the studio, with the AI Reviewer surfacing what needs attention first and separating errors from style.
Download in the format you need, ready for festivals, screening copies or streaming delivery.
Interview-heavy documentaries with multiple speakers and languages
Nature and wildlife films requiring precise narration timing
Historical documentaries with archival footage and voiceover
Investigative journalism with sensitive, context-dependent dialogue
Festival submissions requiring multiple language tracks
Streaming platform delivery with strict format requirements
Your linguists stay yours. Hello8 is the studio they work in, not a vendor that replaces them.
Our segmenter carries a French and English model of where a subtitle may end. It breaks before connectors and relative pronouns, and refuses to end a cue on an article, a preposition or an elided form. Reading speed is enforced during cue generation, before the first write, so your linguists work inside the constraint instead of against a later pass that undoes their phrasing. Other languages use universal rules, and we say which is which on each language page.
The reviewer classifies guillemet formatting, optional commas and French typographic spacing as stylistic, and keeps grammar, agreement and mistranslation as errors. Your reviewer sees what matters first rather than a flat wall of warnings, and can accept or dismiss a whole class of suggestions in one gesture.
SRT, VTT and ASS as sidecar files, or subtitles burned into the video for screening copies, with the font embedded so it renders the same on any machine. SDH with speaker identification and non-speech information, which is what the EAA and RGAA frameworks require of a subtitle track.
Speaker turns keep their own source language, and diarization separates them during transcription. A trilingual interview becomes one timed track, not three files to reconcile. Every target language shares that transcript and that timing pass, so a mis-heard proper noun is corrected once, at the source, for all of them.
Our reference work is on testimony and archive footage for a European memorial institution: degraded source audio, multiple languages inside single interviews, and a delivery standard set by an institution rather than a platform.
Book a free call to discuss your project. We'll help you find the right approach for your documentary.