Subtitles going off screen?

[Afterlife]

I have some subtitle files and in the movie i put them in occasionaly they span off the screen so im losing some words.

I checked the length of some lines and they are like 48+ characters for the ones that go off screen.

So is there a fast easy way (a program) that could go in and fix all my subs to make sure they all fit?

thanks

[Cyrax9]

No program is going to do this for you but some common sense and features of certain programs will.

Check to see if your editing program has a "Title Safe" area -- TURN IT ON, this eliminates about 99.9% of subtitle problems I've encountered.

Second, all TVs are not created equally. Theres a 00.1% chance your TV simply may use the "Fishbowl" design, especially if it's a CRT "Tube" TV made by a company like Sharp or Toshiba made before 2000 and you paid less than $800 for it.

My grandmother has a 27" "Fishbowl" Sharp TV set and it's ALWAYS cutting subtitles off, even on proffesional videos. This is hard to avoid unless you put your subtitles about a third of the way from the top of the screen so that they're in the TV's lower third section.

IF you don't have the ability to turn on a title-safe box, try "Window-boxing" your video so that you have a set of black bars running around the entire screen and your DVDs are showing everything your PC does. "Windowboxing" is easiy to do in virtual dub, I usually resize the video and "expand frame and letterbox" -- sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't, you could also try re-authoring your disc and using a smaller font size, this can cause letters to run of the screen quite easily.

Hope this helps.

[Jeremiah58]

So is there a fast easy way (a program) that could go in and fix all my subs to make sure they all fit?

thanks

Yes, there is if we are talking about common text based files like .srt, .sub and alike.
Use Subtitle Workshop.
Open your subtitle file, then go to Edit, Select All, then again Edit, Text, Smart Line Adjust.
It would adjust lines up to 40 character (default settings).
It is configurable, though. Read the help file for further instructions.

[Afterlife]

Cyrax thanks, I am using DVD-Lab pro and the DVD has not been burned to disc yet, all problems are noted because I test it in DVD-Lab Pro and with PowerDVD and WMP.

So im assuming that it will come out the same way, ill look into a title safe subtitle option in DVD-Lab Pro tho im fairly sure I would have seen it.

Jeremiah - thanks ill give that a go also

[Afterlife]

Ok Jeremiah I did what you said and it worked, only problem is now in the DVD-Lab pro preview pane for subtitles it only shows 3 lines total, and that max line length has made some like 4-5 lines so unless there is a programatic way to split the sub in half for 2 dif subtitles, ill have to manually do it.

[Afterlife]

OK nevermind subtitle workshop has a dividelines option.

Thanks i think If I play around with it enough I can fix it.

[abc-123]

You realize..... you could have just lowered the font size.

[Jeremiah58]

...yeah, right...and buy a bigger screen TV to read it.