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Chetwood
9th December 2003, 19:09
Since I finally managed to import my selfmade movies into Maestro I'm currently working on importing my own subtitles. I've timed them from .wav in Substation Alpha and now I wanna use MaestroSBT 2.4.2.0 to generate .son and bitmap files.

From all the original DVDs I own I prefer the subtitles that come with the DS9 series since they can be read well from a distance even on smaller TVs. Thus I extracted some bitmaps from an ep and tried to mimic those settings in MaestroSBT. Unfortunately this is where I'm stuck.

As you can see if you download and zoom in on this small screenshot (http://chetwood.netfirms.com/subs.html) the subs start from the inside with white - black - blue and are placed on a red background. So in Maestro I choose Windows BMP 4 bits as the output format and under 'rendering' I select:


Two colours for text, one for outline, no antialias (absolutely no clue if this is correct!)
primary text color: white
anti-alias/secondary text color: black
outline/tertiary text color: blue
background: red


I've tried almost any combination of these settings but none of them achieved the result I'm aiming at. Like always I'm not sure if I'm getting the whole idea of color mapping. For one, I'm not sure why I can also set different colors in the styles menu; is this the final font that will be displayed in the movie due to color mapping? Cause the font visible in DS9 episodes is white text with a grey outline and not in those colors the bitmaps consist of.

Any suggestions on how to get the subtitle colors I want? TIA!

dvd_master
10th December 2003, 00:40
I'm not sure why it's not keeping the settings you want, but you can just modify the script (Maestro format?) to make it so read is always transparent, and set the rest properly. It doesn't seem like anything is wrong with the Bitmaps themselves, just wrong color.


If it's a son, find this part in your script (should be towards the top)


Color (0 1 2 3)
Contrast (15 15 15 0)

I THINK the color order is blue, red, black, white... so you will want to change it to

Color (1 3 2 9)
Contrast (15 0 15 15)

And then it will work. The above Color settings should make them black border with a yellow inside. You can change the numbers or just edit the palette if you want different colors.

Chetwood
10th December 2003, 12:10
Originally posted by dvd_master
I'm not sure why it's not keeping the settings you want, but you can just modify the script (Maestro format?) to make it so read is always transparent, and set the rest properly. It doesn't seem like anything is wrong with the Bitmaps themselves, just wrong color.

If it's a son, find this part in your script (should be towards the top)


I've thought about that too but fiddling with the .son script won't change the already generated bmps. And even though I've used a similar sized font the bmps I generated with my supposedly correct setting look crap.

So how do I make them look ok in the first place? As soon as I got them right I can always use the script settings of the ds9 subs to get them displayed in the right colors in Maestro.

dvd_master
10th December 2003, 16:52
Do you have Photoshop? You can run an automated thing that will switch the colors but it will take a few steps. It really would be a lot easier for you to modify the script. It would show absolutly no difference when playing as if the colors were changed.

LB
19th December 2003, 05:54
What you gotta do is select "load color mapping" or something along those lines INSIDE of maestro. Like, goto sub #1, double cliick on it on the timeline to open it up, then fiddle around till you get to the colors TAB and you will see like a modify color setting. From there you can load a color template, and so you need to load your .son I think. Just do it on one subtitle, and it will be applied to the rest. But that is most likely the cause of your problem. W/o loading the color template, you won't get the colors you chose in SBT.