Special kind of subtitle in "Tears of the Sun"

[drpaulng]

Does anyone have the idea how the "non-standard" subtitle (Affrica English Fact Track) was done with explanation tags in graphic form rather than lines of words.

[mpucoder]

DVDs use subpictures (not subtitles), which are 4 color graphics. They are not restricted to text.

[drpaulng]

It seems the "sub-graphic" was authored as "subtitle". Maybe the author just replaced the subtitle.bmp with corresponding subgraphic.bmp and imported them through *.sst method (scenarist).

Where can we get help in designing the .sst script for scenarist?

[influenza]

if you extraxt the subtitles the normal way (using subrip/vobsub or whatever) and save them as as scenarist file you'll have your sst file and your subpictures.

[drpaulng]

Originally posted by influenza
if you extraxt the subtitles the normal way (using subrip/vobsub or whatever) and save them as as scenarist file you'll have your sst file and your subpictures.

Thank you!

If I want to author subtitles like these "sub-graphics" anew, can you suggest a good method?

[influenza]

What do you mean by author? Create them from scratch? Open one of the extracted subs, you you know the size and colors used etc.

You can just import them into scenarist and set the correct time. Or create a sst file yourslef with the correct times.

[oddyseus]

The special things u need to observe while making a sst file is the header and the formating of the time code lines.

U can copy another file and replace the timecodes and the bmp names to produce your own.

[drpaulng]

It seems, as we see in the "Tears of the Sun" example, the subgraphic has "more than 4 basic colors." If you rip the subgraphic by Subrip, you'll get a 4-colored subpictures with .sst for scenarist. At the point of putting back these pure colors (red/white/black/blue) into the scene, you need to re-assign the colors for showing on the screen. The point is, during the course of display, some of the colors shown changed from yellow to green which means you do not have only one script to put the orignal colors to re-assigned colors, you need more than one script for the change of color.

Anyone can do it with simply one-script method?

[oddyseus]

No! u need a Color (x y z a) statement inside the script to instruct the player to switch one color display to another during playback.

[drpaulng]

Well, I have tried to re-author "Tears of the Sun" with the ripped subgraphics in form of subtitles. After I put the script for the first few subgraphics with certain display colors corresponding to the original colors, the whole subtitles scheme remains the same throughout. So I tried to edit the display colors one by one at the middle of the movie. It is possible to change the display colors in the middle of the movie and I started to appreciate the patience the original DVD author paid so much.

CONCLUSION after the above experiment:
For me, the quickest method of authoring such kind of non-standard subtitles (subgraphic) is to made a subtitles stream first and then replace the subtitles by the subgraphics. The original subtitles.bmp can be found in the "cache folder" or can be ripped by SUBRIP with automatic generation of .sst script from the vob (writing the script is very tedious indeed). Fine tuning of display color during the course of the movie is done according to the author's taste.

[mpucoder]

There is nothing "non-standard" about this, it very much obeys the spec. There is no such thing, in DVDs, as a subtitle, or subgraphic. There is only subpictures.

DVDs are confusing enough without subverting the nomenclature due to lack of understanding.

[drpaulng]

I use the words "subgraphics" and "non-standard" just to highlight the special kind of subpictures consist of graphical presentation rather than lines of words in usual "standard subtitles". If you have seen the display of these "subgraphics" in the TEARS OF THE SUN DVD, you should agree on my description. I myself have never seen such an interesting subtitles presented in graphic form. I was very impressed by the original idea and effort being put on this DVD.

Anyway, new invention-words are just for closer description of what I've seen on this DVD...Sorry for the confusion.

[influenza]

Well I do not want to dissappoint you but there are numerous DVS with subpictures like that (spider-man, die an other day, men in black etc etc). It's not that speciel. you can just rip them and import the sst file and you're set. Sometimes there are fadin/out effects and then it's an other story

[drpaulng]

So I was very ignorant about these DVDs! Sorry for that. But do you know a way to do this "subgraphic" thing properly with whatever kind of software? Any easier way? If no, I think the "subgraphic" authors have done the very tedious job to show us these subpictures. Bravo to them!

[influenza]

I always use doitfast4u, which also takes care of the subpictures for me. Never had any problem.

[Arky]

Originally posted by drpaulng
So I was very ignorant about these DVDs! Sorry for that. But do you know a way to do this "subgraphic" thing properly with whatever kind of software? Any easier way? If no, I think the "subgraphic" authors have done the very tedious job to show us these subpictures. Bravo to them!

drpaulng, have you read this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37074&highlight=ghostbusters)?


Arky ;o)

[drpaulng]

Thank you for your link.

I'll study hard on the subpicture script.

[drpaulng]

Thank you all for replying to my question.

I think I have mastered the essential parts here in the subtitles creation with scenarist.

What the scenarist online-help does not mention is that the color and contrast can be changed in the middle of the script.sst. With the addition of advanced effects (fade/wipe/scroll), a lot of combined effects can be done to the subtitles. I have done some experiments in manipulating all these effects. It is wonderful to make the subtitles moving in and out of the movie screen with color changing. Scenarist is really powerful but needs special training because there are many small details not shown in the manual.

Now I have to find out a good graphical software that can help creating 4-colored bmp pictures easily...may be CorelDraw (vector graphic) can do the job better than Photoshop (bitmap graphic) during the design procedure.

[drpaulng]

Thanks to DVD Menu Studio, I have successfully done the anecdote subtitles with a color/contrast changing script with 4-colored graphic subpicture (I call it "subgraphic" here, in order to make difference from the line-by-line subtitles with normal characters).