Help needed with MSU Subtitle Remover in VDub

[Lippy Lipstick]

For a client I need to subtitle videomaterial which already contains english hardsubs.
I do this in VirtualDub with Gabest's Textsubfilter. Synced my subtitles to the existing
hardsubs so they are identical in timing. My first idea was to place my subtitles on the
english ones with a black opaque box, but I'm not satisfied with the results.
That's why I thought I should give it a try with MSU Subtitle Remover.
The big problem now is the SETTINGS. Especially the values for the area. As soon as
I change this Virtualdub crashes. Can somebody explain to me how I should interprete
these parameters?

Here's a snapshot of the material I'm dealing with:



Any help will be greatly appreciated!

[guns1inger]

You will ultimately be happier with your first approach. I have never seen anyone achieve anything approaching the sample videos posted at MSU. The best result is usually a distracting blurred area, usually more annoying that what is left after a delogo filter is used on a static overlay. It is worse because it isn't a constant area being attacked, but keeps changing, which means the blurred area keeps shifting around.

Better to just hide the old subs and lay down the new ones. I would even go so far as a permanent letter box bar across the bottom of the screen to hide the old subs.

[Lippy Lipstick]

Thanks, Guns1inger, for another swift reaction!

You are absolutely right. In all ways the result will never satisfy a good result.
Or my client wants to give me a few months time and pay a lot to blur things frame-by-frame.
It's not a constant logo or something like that and I already feared endless changing filtersettings
ending up in a screaming frustration... I also thought of putting a permanent black bar to mask the
hardsubs, but this will chop off a major part of the picture itself.
Anyway, this hardsubbed DVD is the only thing my client has and they already have been warned that
the result will be - nicely said - rubbish. So I decided to make them 'happy' with the opaque box overlay.

[manono]

Since it's for DVD, you can have selectable subs that when on will show a black rectangle nicely covering the original hardcoded subs, with the text on top of that. When there aren't any subs there's no black rectangle. This is done by shrinking and making opaque the usually transparent background, using DVDSubEdit. r0lZ explains how he uses this ability of the program:

I have used that method to hide the hardcoded subtitles with a subpic stream, or to make subtitles appearing on the credits more visible. The method is easy. Try it, and you will immediately see if it suits your needs.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1369916#post1369916

How you do it is explained in the first post in the link. What I quoted above is taken from his next post after that. You have to have first authored the DVD with subs normally. Afterwards you open the 'Full Domain' in DVDSubEdit and follow his instructions. Be sure to read the rest of the posts about it because further down an even easier way is given by jeanl, the DVDSubEdit developer, saying you can change the settings in the Preferences to make this happen. The whole process seems to be quite easy.

[Lippy Lipstick]

Thanks Manono, but I'm not fond of selectable DVD-subs. Since they also gonna show it on the big screen (...)
the quality of the selectable-DVD-sub-method will become more terrible in my opinion. That's why I used Textsub,
as this gives me better results concerning quality. Above all, working in the subtitling industry I learned to live
with the fact that subtitling is one of the last steps in post-production and most clients need their material yesterday...
As I said, my client knows the result will not be splendid.

[guns1inger]

And they cannot access a copy of the video without hard-coded subs ?

[manono]

You work in the industry and think hardcoded subs are better? You have to reencode=video degradation. You have to add in the subs=noise and other garbage all around the subs. There's a reason retail DVDs almost always have selectable subs, and it's not just because different people may not need them, or may need different languages.

You're starting with a DVD, aren't you? Why reencode it with hardcoded subs when it's not necessary at all? That subtitling is one of the last steps in post-production excuse is a non-starter since it'll take all of about an hour to demux the original DVD, remux and add in the subs, replace it into the original DVD getting back the menu and anything else it might contain, and then edit them as described in the thread. Did you have a look at the pic provided in that thread? You think those subs look bad?

If they have to be hardcoded (and they don't), there are other ways to accomplish this, one of which is to use a really big outline around the subs. Also, I believe that SubtitleWorkshop has the ability to add the opaque background for subs to be hardcoded, but AlanHK is the one that's done that before. He'll probably be around soon.

[manono]

I was fooling around with it some more to try and make it compatible with your (inferior, in my opinion) workflow. I opened a DVD in DVDSubEdit, made the changes as described in that thread and saved my work. I tested the DVD and then had nice selectable subs just the way you wanted them. Except that they were selectable. I extracted the SUP file using PGCDemux. I took the SUP file and opened it in SubtitleCreator and immediately saved it as VobSubs (IDX/SUB format). I also could have extracted the VobSubs directly using VobSub Configure (comes included with the VobSub package). I opened the video in VDub (Mod in my case) and rather than using the TextSub filter, I used the VobSub filter, scrolled to my VobSubs, edited them to lower them a bit, and this was the result:

[Lippy Lipstick]

This is all my client can give to me. There is a lot of time-pressure as they want to show it this weekend I'm a bit stuck to find a compromise between degradation and readable subtitles. And before Manono attacks me... I have enough experience to tell that time is almost always a big issue if people want to have their films subtitled. It's more time-consuming then people think and cannot be compared with a lot of homebrew 'translations' I sometimes see. I deal with all kinds of media requiring subtitles, from 16mm to DCP and I know by experience that selectable DVD-subs are ugly on a big screen, but this case is quite particular concerning time and money.

[Lippy Lipstick]

Nice example, Manono, but another problem is the size of the black box. It's a pain in the... to check all subtitles
if they will overlap properly. I'm dealing with 1600 subtitles and you cannot avoid that the existing subs will be
behind this black box. There is always a difference in length and amount of characters per line, so it's a painstaking
job to check each independant subtitle.

[manono]

Geez, did you not understand what it does? You said you already have subs. This takes those subs and adds the same amount all around all the time. Look, here's a shorter line, also with 20 pixels of black to the right and left, and 8 pixels above and below. These amounts are adjustable. You can make the box as large or as small as you want, relative to the size the subs themselves take up. Yes, sometimes one language will take more letters/words to say the same thing than it does in another language. If you like, you can make the black extend all the way to the sides, although that shouldn't really be necessary. And one really good thing about it is that the black box appears only when the subs are showing.

[Lippy Lipstick]

No offense, Manono, I appreciate your help dearly. I really want to investigate your method this weekend, but for this project we had a day and a half and the deadline has been reached You know, already subtitled material always makes me nervous. When dealing with already subtitled 35mm-materials we are doomed to reposition our subtitles as these are physically burnt-in by laser. This results in a bunch of confusing text on screen. With digitized material you can do a lot more, I know. Keep you updated on my findings.