my first DVD subtitles - help!

megabit wrote on 9/30/2008, 9:43 AM

I've just finished preparing subtitles for a 10mins interview to be contained on the DVD I'm producing. To my horror, after hitting the "Make DVD: button, DVDA 5 performed a quick analysis and spit on me a list of error messages, each to this effect:

'movie' contains a subtitle event on subtitle track 1 starting at time 00:00:58:10 that is too complex due to one or more horizontal lines.

Now, I looked up the Help file and read that I can change the font (it's plain ARIAL), enter line breaks (I have some where needed to display 2 lines of text - 3 would be too many), or turn off the Outline...

I tried and turned Outline off, and it compiled a proper DVD for me. However, I am hugely disappointed with the large black rectangles with white text on them, obscuring the picture!

IS there any other way to keep the text outlined, and still be able to compile the DVD? Is my font too big (20)? I'm very disappointed!

Comments

bStro wrote on 9/30/2008, 12:04 PM

By default, subtitles use color set 4, and the outline / background color of color set 4 is set to black. To change this, select one of your subtitle events, go to the Color Sets tab of the Properties window, and select the outline / background color setting. By clicking the down arrow to the right, you will be able to edit the color and its transparency, which is controlled by the box labeled "A". A value of 255 is completely opaque, a value of 0 is completely transparent.

Rob

megabit wrote on 9/30/2008, 12:20 PM

Thanks for your answer.

I hate it when I don't understand exactly what's happening and why, but it looks like I didn't have any offending, hidden formatting (was copying from Word), or too many characters per line.

I changed Arial to Arial Bold, and voila ! - no errors! (And there were 48 before). Go figure...

I have my subtitles without the black box (Outlined), but I don't feel very comfortable about it. Any possible explanation of this behaviour? TIA

bStro wrote on 9/30/2008, 1:18 PM

I don't feel very comfortable about it

Why not? You got what you want, and you're not hurting anyone. ;-)

Any possible explanation of this behaviour?

A subtitle is limited to a certain amount of data. How much data is used by a subtitle can be affected by many factors -- the font, the number of characters in the entire subtitle, the number of characters on a single line, the font style, and outlines. It's not any one thing but rather a combination of things that will make the event "too complex."

Rob

megabit wrote on 10/1/2008, 5:21 AM

Robert, changing the background to transparent (A=0) works great, with all font/style combinations I tested so far...

Many thank, indeed!

Piotr