Dialogue and Subtitles in Sequencer

Hi,
I’m trying to set up a pipeline that will allow us to create dialogue able to be played back in sequencer with subtitles showing. It’s likely we won’t have actual recordings of dialogue until later, but it would be nice to be able to set up early versions of these sequences with the tracks in place and subtitles showing for now until such a point as we import wavs for the dialogue.

The dialogue wave asset seems suited for this purpose. It allows you to specify a subtitle and then link to a sound wave asset for the dialogue sound later.

However, there doesn’t appear to be a way to playback dialogue wave assets in Sequencer and see the subtitles, at least not without attaching a sound wave asset. The audio track doesn’t accept dialogue wave assets directly. It does accept sound cue assets, which I can create from a dialogue wave asset, but playing back those seems to early out before it gets to the point any subtitles would be played. And in fact from digging in the code, it appears that the subtitle property on the dialogue wave asset is really only used to pass on the subtitle to the sound wave- it looks like all actual functionality of the subtitle manager is linked to the sound wave rather than dialogue wave, and so without a sound wave there is no subtitle.

Am I missing something? This seems an awkward flow for dialogue in an engine- it’s very unusual to start with recordings as opposed to script, and it’s always useful to preview script as a subtitle. Am I missing a step where temporary sound waves are somehow able to be created?

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

I’ve generated an empty sound wav and imported that. That makes the dialogue wave subtitles show up when played in sequencer. A bit of a hack- curious if others have other solutions.

3 Likes