Creating aesthetically pleasing subtitles?

[Like the Cure]

Here's the sitch: I used this guide (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=83566) to add subtitles I had in SRT format, and eventually I got it to work fine. My new English subs were correct and timed perfectly. I only have one problem: The text the DVDlab Pro produces is extremely ugly. It looks pretty harsh, like jagged and a bit jarring. I'm pretty sure it only uses 2 colors, the main color and an outline.

My goal is this: I want to creat subtitles that look a lot nicer, basically. I have this other movie, Casshern, and Its subtitles look wonderful. Besides being a nice readable font, it uses a few colors, like white, gray, then black. How could I go about creating subtitles like that? And how could I then compile them in DVDlab Pro like in the tutorial I linked to above?

Any help would be great, thanks in advance!

[CoNS]

About the look of the subtitles: I haven't tried DVDLab Pro, as it's a commercial program, but from what I've heard from other users the subtitles created with this app look just fine/normal...

Please notice, that DVD subtitles can look very different when viewing the DVD on a PC monitor via a software player, compared to a standalone player/TV-set. If you analyze readymade DVD (bitmap) subtitles on your PC you'll see that the subtitles inside the subtitle images always look a bit jagged.

This is because only four colours can be used per DVD subtitle image. You'll need one colour for the outline, one for the inside of the characters, one for a (transparent) background which leaves you with only one colour left for anti-aliasing, i.e. smoothing out the edge between the outline and the inside of a character.

On a TV, you won't notice this as much, as the pixels tend to blend into each other somewhat more, of course depending on the TV size/resolution, quality etc.

Now, as I said, I haven't tried DVDLab Pro. But one tool that creates very nice looking subtitles (sometimes even better looking subs than on the original DVD) is the freeware program SubtitleCreator (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=80109). See the .pdf user guide that comes with SC, along with this post (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=672301#post672301) for further info on how to add subtitles to a DVD using SubtitleCreator and a few other freeware tools.

My preferred font settings when creating subtitles in SC:

Font face: Arial (regular/normal, not bold)
Font size: 21
Outline: 5
Colours: The default subtitle colours in SC

However, please notice that you cannot combine the SC method with DVDLab Pro, as SC creates the DVD bitmap subs in the common SUP file format, which DVDLab Pro - AFAIK - can't use.

[unmei]

Concerning the only 4 colors issue, i've seen some DVD subs that use no outline but 2 colors to anti-alias the font against the backgroud. That looked pretty nice even on a TFT, but it might be a bitch to read if the video approaches font color (IIRC that movie had the subs in the bottom matte, so no problem there).

[CoNS]

Concerning the only 4 colors issue, i've seen some DVD subs that use no outline but 2 colors to anti-alias the font against the backgroud. That looked pretty nice even on a TFT, but it might be a bitch to read if the video approaches font color (IIRC that movie had the subs in the bottom matte, so no problem there).Hmmm, could you supply/upload a SUP file with a subtitle stream made this way?

Many movies have black parts at the top/bottom, and if the subtitle you describe look okay, it could be an idea to ask Paddington (the author of SubtitleCreator) to implement an option for the user to create subs without outline and with two AA colours...

(You can rip a subtitle stream to a SUP file using PgcDemux. And if you upload the SUP file, make sure to rar or zip it first)

[Like the Cure]

Thanks for the replies. I ended up using Subtitle Creator (which is great) then muxing with IFOedit. I like that so much better than DVDlab! (It also seemed to finish the job faster, but that might have been my imagination...) I also found it very easy to keep the original Korean Subs by using VOBsub, then sub2sup (which doesnt have much to do with this thread, but was a problem plaging me and my inexperience). Again, thanks.