Subtitle with DVD Maestro

[chung_chang]

I found something weird with a couple of my original movie DVDs:

Movie#1 - Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind (Collector's Edition)
I turn on English subtitle, fastforward (8x), subtitle disappears, play normal speed again, subtitle does not come back for at least 10-20 seconds (yes, actors are speaking). Even if I switch subtitle off and back on, it still takes 10-20 seconds for subtitle to appear again.

Movie#2 - Office Space
I turn on English subtitle, fastforward (8x), subtitle disappears, play normal speed again, subtitle comes back within 1-2 seconds.

Both DVS's are original and tested on 3 different players (Apex, JVC and RCA) plus WinDVD on my PC. All behaved as I described above, consistently.

Now, to my subject, I use DVD Maestro 2.9 to author my home DV video with date+time code in the subtitle. After I burn to DVD-r with NERO, it behaves just like Movie#1 above. Obviously, I would like it to behave like Movie#2. Perhaps there are certain settings in DVD Maestro to fix this? Perhaps Scenarist would solve it (I don't have it to test)? Any other ideas?

[fifer55]

sounds like the length of the subtitles is whats going on, since you fast forward, it obviously skips the subs for that particular scene/s. i have had similar problems with subtitles, and found that the duration of the particualr sub is more than likely the issue, and or the chapter point(highly unlikely, but it has crossed my mind).
anyway, as far as checking in maestro, try playing with the length of the subs, see what happens. sorry i couldnt help more

[chung_chang]

Ok. I'll do more testing.

I started with my subtitle as date+time code which updates every second. The problem is that whenever the subtitle changes, the whole subtitle goes off and comes back on. Doing this every second creates a flashing effect which is very annoying. So, I decided to update the subtitle every minute and just drop the seconds in my time code. This was better but created the second problem as described in my top post.

I wish there was a way to eliminate the time gap between 2 consecutive subtitles. I tried to overlap consecutive subtitles and it seemed to help but it still flashes to a smaller degree which my eyes picked up and distracted me from the video. Besides, I believe overlapping subtitle is non-standard (even Maestro complained but went ahead and compiled anyways) and may or may not work properly on all DVD players. Any other advice?