Subtitling: delaying subtitles

Question

Is there a way to automatically set all subtitles so they will appear slightly after the speaker begins speaking, and disappear slightly before the speaker is done talking?

Paul · Answer

You can't do this automatically because there is nothing in the software to recognise when the speech actually starts and when it finishes. Even when you work with the waveform it may be quite difficult to distinguish between other noise (music, talking, explosions etc...) so automating it would probably need a lot of QA anyway. Even if we could do this, and we probably could, it would take quite some effort and I'm not sure of the ROI. 
 We can add fixed time intervals between each subtitle with a single click but not variable ones based on a start and finish time that reflects the start and finish of spoken words. 
 I think an opensource project called Subtitle2Go might be able to do this, although maybe only for the German language, and there may be other tools available... but currently it would be out of scope for us.

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Subtitling: delaying subtitles