Regina Sullivan SUPPORTING TRIBAL MISSIONS THROUGH MEDIA I never knew subtitles could be so difficult! Last week, Praise the Lord!, the CREDITS were finished. Yay! One step closer to a finished DVD. Now the last thing to do on the DVD is finish up the subtitles. Then it will be ready for testing… Please pray that it all will come together!
So first…I had everything set up…
1. Set up the subtitles in Final Cut Pro with the TextUpPro plugin. Then export xml file…convert to stl format for DVDSP through TitleExchangePro and then import to DVDSP (once you can get it to recognize the timecode and import!). Ok, so that’s pretty easy. Or rather, it is now that it’s done. But, then I found out DVDSP can’t control the kerning (space between the letters), and that’s really bothersome for a typographer.
So…I discovered that most people use graphics for their subtitles instead of text through DVDSP to make it look nicer. Only I can’t find a nice easy way to do that. I’ve tried Belle Nuit Subtitler, which exports a nice tiff, but it doesn’t really look that great. It does funny things like poking a hole in the side of an r, and has three h’s on the same line – that all look like different fonts, when they are the same font. It’s probably just the way that it converts the font to the screen-size tif (720×480). I even used the recommended settings and tried some variations with the “soft edge” and the size of the outline. It’s converting it to 4-color chroma for DVDSP import.
So I can have kerned fonts that look a little ragged…or straighter fonts that need kerning. (Creat or)
The other option is to use the .m2v file with the subtitles embedded on it. But I really want to have “real” subtitles – the kind that say “English” and “Spanish” on your DVD player. And that’s the reason I went with the stl file to begin with.
The project REALLY needs to be done soon, so we’ll see what I decide tomorrow as I work on it.
Gotta love publish dates…what time did I really write this? =)
