Positioning SUP subs from Subtitle Creator

[AlanHK]

I used Subtitle Creator to make a SUP file.
After authoring with GuiforDVDAuthor the subtitles are too high on the screen.

Is the position of the subs set in the SUP file? Or where?

Probably relevant that the video is MPEG1 352x240. I can't find anywhere in Subtitle Creator to specify the video size.

DVDsubedit is unable to display the VOBs, otherwise that would be an easy fix.

[AlanHK]

Well, I fixed this by trial and error.

Even though I was using video with resolution 352x240, to get the subtitles positioned correctly near the bottom of the screen, when making the SUP file I had to specify the subtitles 518 pixels down from the top.

So apparently the scales used by subtitle streams are independent of the video resolution.

[GTRBudda]

Hello there. Yes, I've noticed that too. I had a .sup file made with Txt2Sup at 720x480 with a 352x240 video, authored together with Muxman. The subs weren't visible in MPC, but playback on a stand alone player was fine. Before I tried that, I had authored with DVDAuthorGui with an .srt file (and fixing the video resolution with IFOEdit). The subs were fine in MPC, but on the stand alone the sub pic was set to the top left at a quarter the size of the screen. When I tried to set up the sub larger than than the video there were no sub pics created.

BTW, have you tried viewing the subpics with SubRip? It can display without ripping, thought the colors might not be what's expected.

[AlanHK]

I haven't used Subrip.

The rather convoluted workflow is currently:

I usually use SRT files from a site like opensubtitles.org.

Edit them in Subtitle Workshop, good for syncing.
Spellcheck and make other adjustments with Ultraedit. (Eg, curly quote marks.)

Then Subtitle Creator to make the SUPs from SRTs.
It's functional but very poor interface, settings and defaults jump around without much sense.
When I put in the correct spacing of about 500 to go at the bottom of the screen, the subs are shown as below the bottom edge. It had a a lot of stupid automatic text adjustments which I finally found how to turn off.

DVDsubedit can open the SUP and displays the subs in correct position, but not colours.
I might adjust the positions here after doing a test burn.
(It goes crazy when trying to display a VOB made from an MPEG1 though.)

To adjust colours Supview. That creates a PAL palette file.

Then I can load the SUP and PAL file in GuiforDVDAuthor.

[manusse]

Hi AlanHK,

It's functional but very poor interface, settings and defaults jump around without much sense.

Paddington and myself are still working on SubtitleCreator. If you could precisely tell what you don't like and how you would like it to be, this would allow us to improve SubtitleCreator's interface to meet your requirements.

It had a a lot of stupid automatic text adjustments which I finally found how to turn off.

Do you know that we develop this software on our spare time? So instead of complaining help us improve it. Become a beta tester for the feature you want. This will be more positive and allow everybody to use better tested and fully functional software.

I hope you will agree to help us improve SC.

Cheers
Manusse

[AlanHK]

I hope you will agree to help us improve SC.

Whoops! Sorry for my ungrateful remarks.
I didn't mean to be rude, and it is certainly better than a few other SUP-creating apps I tried.
I was rather frazzled after running into so many problems doing what I thought would be a simple job.
Probably mostly due to my inexperience.

I used version 1.92, I see now you have an update, so some of this may not be relevant.

So, some specific things that bugged me:

Profiles:
There is no indication of the current profile. You have to pull down the profile menu item to see that.
To make a change to a profile it seems I have to do "profile/manage", rather than reflecting current settings (I can save these to a new profile, but not modify an existing one, if I understand it correctly.) And when I open the Manage dialogue, instead of the current profile, it always opens with number 1. A few times I modified that until I noticed I was changing the wrong profile.

What I meant by a "stupid" automatic text adjustment was the "on load" settings, which delete text without any warning. I was restoring backups every time I used this till I worked out what was causing it. These should default off, and preferably ask permission before deleting anything even if on, IMHO.

As mentioned, the size of the screen seems limited to just two sizes: PAL or NTSC. But other subtitle apps also seem only to have two settings. Though I was using an NTSC 352x240 video, I apparently needed to use a PAL size screen to position it. Can you explain the relationship between the scale of the video and the subtitles -- are they independent?
And to help orientate the user, perhaps a grid and a scale could be displayed if chosen?

Background: If I make the background non-transparent, it fills up the maximum area for every subtitle. E.g., if I allow three lines, it is always three lines high, even though most subtitles are only one line. That was one reason I used Supview to set the colours, in that the background is just the area behind the text.

If I'm authorng a new disk, not reworking an old one, I won't have an IFO file, which I believe is where the colours are defined. Is there a way to save the palette; perhaps creating a dummy IFO (many authoring apps seem to be able to read an IFO to copy its colour scheme)? Or is there another kind of standard palette?

Sorry again for any offence...

[GTRBudda]

One of these days I'm gonna' have to bite the bullet and install .NET so I can try Subtitle Creator.....

I can't say I have a real 'work flow' with subtitles, I've done so few of them. What I've done so far, after I find or manualy type a source is:

Check or modify the sync with VisualSubSync. It syncs to the audio, if your audio is in sync, so are your subs. Then into Subtitle Workshop for further editing, format conversion, etc.

After that, it's whatever the project needs. If I'm not happy with the color of the subs, PGCEdit is great for changeing them after authoring. The one time I needed a .sup file, the one I mentioned above, it was Txt2Sup. I've done some experimenting with MaestroSBT (as you know from my long winded suggestion in that other thread ) It's pretty powerful and fairly easy to use, though so far I haven't really needed what it can do. I can imagine some cases, though......

As I 'play with the toys', I keep finding new ways to use them. Subrip has actually been most useful for grabing sub pics from menus, along with viewing the sub pics. In Subtitle Workshop, I just found a way to make animated buttons (sub pics) in the menu, along with a few other tools.

So far, I haven't found one tool that does everthing I might want to try, so I've wound up learning a whole slew of them. In combination though, I'm getting the results I need.

[manusse]

@AlanHK,

Thanks for your detailed explanations. We will carefully look at them and try to take your remarks into account.

Otherwise, you should use the new beta (2.1b4). This will allow you to preview your subtitles on top of the DVD video, adds the support for VobSub files, allows you to OCR your subs if you have Office 2003 installed, uses Google translate to automatically translate your subs plus other that I don't remember plus many bug fixes (see readme.txt for all the details).

In the new beta, there is also the support for a default palette. (Format->Use prefered subtitle colors -> Overwrite all colors). If your original DVD has no palette, you should use it.

The easiest way to use it with SC if you are authoring your DVD is the following:
1°) Create your DVD without subtitles
2°) Use the tools -> DVD authoring wizard to add your subtitles to the DVD. The wizard will automatically change the DVD palette if it detects there is no subtitle stream available. You must either use a SUP file that you have generated with the "Use prefered subtitle colors" or use an SRT file and make sure again that you select the "Use prefered subtitle colors" before generating the sup file.

If you don't want to use the DVD authoring wizard:
1°) Generate your SUP with the default palette.
2°) Generate your DVD the usual way
3°) Use DVDSubedit to update the palette of your DVD (you must guess the colors by hand). See this guide: http://download.videohelp.com/DVDSubEdit/Guides/ChangingColors/Guide.htm

Cheers
Manusse

[borax]

As Alan uses GfD for authoring, some remarks/questions:
Stand Alone DVD Players automatically resize the video to 'full screen', but not subtitles (that's also the reason why you need several sets of buttons for 16:9 menus, depending on the 'play mode': Wide screen, Letterboxed or Pan&Scan). Some soft players do the same, others not. For other videos (avi, divx...) this is different (video and subtitles are scaled identically or by aspect or rendered 'onthefly' from text files...).

@manusse
Is the 'default palette' in SC 'editable' (colors may be changed by the user)?
- if yes: Is this 'default palette' exportable (in any format)?
- if no: What colors are you using for the 'default palette'?
(Then I can create a suitable palette file for the use in GfD myself)

[manusse]

Hi borax,

The answer to your question is Yes and No.
There are 16 colors in the default palette, from which 12 are hardcoded and 4 are settable by the user.
The 12 hardcoded colors are the following:

R,G,B
C0=(0xf6,0xfd,0xa2)
C1=(0xe8,0x3f,0x07)
C2=(0xec,0xea,0x7c)
C3=(0x81,0x80,0x43)
C4=(0x12,0xeb,0x12)
C5=(0x15,0xbe,0xf6)
C6=(0x03,0x00,0xe3)
C7=(0x4c,0x03,0x53)
C8=(0xc1,0x22,0x62)
C9=(0xff,0x00,0x00)
C10=(0xfa,0xff,0x1a)
C11=(0xeb,0x12,0xeb)

They have been chosen from some DVD with subs for hearing-impaired people.

The 4 last colors are settable in the Settings.xml file located in the following folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Application Data\SubtitleCreator\

C12 = "PreferedBackgroundColor"
C13 = "PreferedForegroundColor"
C14 = "PreferedOutlineColor"
C15 = "PreferedAntialiasColor"

As it is still a beta feature, this policy could change. What's your opinion?

Is it exportable? Not really. What you could do is save the subtitle as VobSub and the palette will be written in the idx file. However, you must know that the DVD uses YUV values for the actual palette. The RGB values inside SubtitleCreator are compatible with muxman but the RGB values in the idx file are slightly transformed to be compatible with VobSub. I also suspect the RGB <-> YUV conversion matrix used by VobSub is not standart. So nothing is really guaranteed. Also if you take some YUV values from an actual DVD (IFO file), convert them to RGB and back to YUV you will not get the same values. So depending on what you plan to do with the palette, you must be very careful and know exactly what you are doing.

Hope this helps

Cheers
Manusse

[borax]

I use subtitles very rarely myself... therefore my opinion is probably not very important. But let's consider the problem described by Alan:

1. You have a mpeg file (mpeg1 or mpeg2) either as elementary streams or muxed, but without any subtitles yet (and therefore also no subtitle palette).
2. You have a text based subtitles file (srt or similar)

For MuxMan you need the subtitles as binary sup file(s)
This can be done with SC. But sup files don't carry any absolut color information, just pointers to a palette. I don't know SC very good, but I think it is possible to set up the colors for the subtitles in any way. For the user it would probably be the most easy to export a 'pseudo' ifo file with the coresponding color palette (like from projectx) which could be used with ifoedit, gfd, dvdauthorgui...

[manusse]

Hi borax,

I like your suggestion of exporting a fake ifo file holding the color palette information like in ProjectX.
I have informed Paddington (SC's author) of this palette problem and I am sure we will find a solution to help users.

Cheers
Manusse

[manusse]

Hi borax,

Following your suggestion the next version of SubtitleCreator will allow exporting/importing palette. It will be compatible with .ifo, .mxp (Muxman project file), .clb (PgcEdit). It will also be possible to copy/paste palettes between SubtitleCreator and PgcEdit.

Cheers
Manusse

[borax]

Great,
THX!

[manusse]

Hi,

Just to let you know that the last version of SubtitleCreator (2.1) is out and includes these functions. You will now be able to export the palette used internally by SubtitleCreator (also import an external palette).

Cheers
Manusse