Aegisub Quick Start (https://aegisubquickstart.wordpress.com/)

As an excellent subtitle-adding software, Aegisub has been used intensively in my company’s video production team. However, its official tutorial is highly text-intensive with little graphics, so training new team members took lots of time and effort.

My task was to create a Quick Start manual to help beginners start quickly and save time and effort for training.

I started by reading the original online manual; it was difficult to understand (perhaps they didn’t have a sufficient budget for documentation). I contacted the SME Cindy, the leader of the subtitle group, who was responsible for new member training on adding subtitles to videos. I made an appointment with her, and she showed me how to use the software to add subtitles to a video. Then I tried by myself to add subtitles to a short video. After that, I reread the original documentation and found it easier to understand.

I created the QuickStart using Madcap Flare because I would like to get both a web version and a PDF version. I got screenshots by using Snagit. I only selected the necessary steps to complete the primary subtitle-adding task. The purpose of this QuickStart is to help users start working first, and then they can learn additional skills by themselves after establishing basic concepts through hands-on experience.

In the beginning, both versions were only for inside users, so the web version was on our internal server. Later I put the site on WordPress for people to access from the Internet; because I couldn’t put the whole site on WordPress (free account) at once, I had to put each page separately and use WordPress’s menu structure. This process involved many reformatting works as the web page layout often messed up after pasting to the WordPress site.

I am the only writer and editor of this online help.

This QuickStart manual has significantly reduced the time and human power used for training new team members and the learning curve for learners.

Later, I wanted to have complete control of this online help’s structure, so I rewrote the whole site in my code and put it on GitHub. Here is its URL: (https://susanpeng.github.io/docs/aegisubHelp/index.html)