• DVD Authoring

  Sonic Scenarist vs. DVD SP subtitle quality

  Posted by Pontepreta on March 19, 2007 at 2:21 am

  Has any one had an opportunity to compare subtitling from both environments? I am wondering if there is, in fact, a substantial quality difference between the two. I have compared DVD Studio Pro and Belle Nuit and seen some subtle differences (each has an advantage in different areas). They don’t seem all that inferior, if at all, to the majority of commercial releases I have seen. A client is convinced that Sonic is better, however, and I would be interested in hearing any opinions.
  Thanks,
  PP

  Bouke Vahl replied 19 years, 4 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Eric Pautsch

  March 19, 2007 at 2:41 pm

  subtitles are subtitles. You can adjustments in both platforms. No difference that I have ever noticed.
• 

  Pontepreta

  March 19, 2007 at 5:10 pm

  Thanks for the confirmation. I have been hard pressed to find anything that even appeared to be superior. When one is used to the quality of text generated on an uncompressed FCP project, DVD subtitle streams are inevitably disappointing…
• 

  Bouke Vahl

  March 21, 2007 at 8:20 am

  Bad quality has to do that you only have 4 colors.
  One transparant,
  One white title
  One black outline

  And here comes the only trick you can do: have the last color to be grey to have at least some anti-aliasing between the outline and the title.

  If you have white only titles, it get’s better as you have two levels of anti aliasing to blend the title into the video. (but of course you only can leave out the border if you have lot’s of dark scenes)

  Chris Linke has a nice plugin to do both. A link is on my site under the ‘links’ button.

  If you have room to spare, do a second encode with open captions (rendered HQ titles in the video)

  Bouke

  http://www.videoToolShed.com
  smart tools for video pro’s

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