Adding varying colours to subtitles?

[scifisam]

Apologies for starting two threads asking for help - in the event that I see a question I can answer, I'll do my best to answer it. I've read the userguides and so on and can't find an answer to this.

Is it possible, in subtitle workshop, Aegisub or anything, to add subtitles of varying colours? By which I mean one line will be white, then another yellow, etc. This is to differentiate between speakers. All I can find is a way to change the colours for the entire file - and I'm not interested in shading and so on, I just want plain white or yellow, green or cyan.

[Baldrick]

I'm pretty sure that ssa/ass subs support it. In aegisub can't you adjust styles for each line?

[scifisam]

I can't work out how. I'm new to these programmes, though.

[Aikousha]

It's actually easy to do. I typically use a standard text editor to do it, however.
The easiest way to do it is using styles in .ass, where you can set the color in each style (text, outline, shadow and background colors), then you just use that style for the line of text you are timing. You define a "Default" style, and then anything else you want to make different is defined with a different style name. If you want, this is an excellent way to define a different color for each character in a movie, thereby, dialogue off-screen is still easily identifiable.
Of course, this means the style is applied to the whole line(s). In this form, the colors are defined as AABBGGRR, where AA is the transparency/alpha.
For greater control, there are "slash" tags that can be done inline. However, I haven't used them, yet, and haven't actually found a comprehensive guide to the tags.

You might wish to find a couple of complicated .ass files from some anime sites to see how this is done. The styles are defined usually near the very top of the file, and are very easy to understand.

[jman98]

Do note that support for ass (Sub Station Alpha) subtitles is not so great on playback devices like DVD and BluRay players and media streamers. If you're planning to play on a PC that's no problem, but you might want to do a test on your playback device to be sure that ass subs are supported and that colors work if you plan to play it on something other than PC.