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(Blu-ray) Superimposed optional video track? (Like subtitles, but better)
In the home video project I’m currently spending an extra week finalizing, I’ve had an idea to use the extra time to add a little extra something. The home video uses clips from various tapes recorded over a 20 year span. I thought it might be nice to generate a secondary video which gives text details on the date (January 2003, etc.)
Easy enough from within After Effects, where I put the home video together to begin with. But the idea is to be able to optionally turn this information off when watching the final disc. Like subtitles, yes.
Here’s the difficulty. I’m not familiar enough with the Blu-ray format’s subtitle capabilities to be able to judge whether or not it could handle what I want to do. I don’t consider what I have in mind to be “subtitles” so much as a second video track which gets superimposed over the main video. I want these “subtitles” to fade in and out, at 60 fps, just as though they had been rendered as part of the main video. I am familiar with DVD subtitles, and such a thing is certainly beyond their scope. Blu-ray? I don’t know. But I suspect Blu-ray subtitles are scarcely any fancier. Still, I have certainly seen plenty of Blu-ray discs which superimpose one video clip over the main video.
Anyway, if the Blu-ray’s subtitle capabilities are not the answer, then how might I go about achieving this, using After Effects and Encore? Encore doesn’t seem to have the ability to use a second video clip in a timeline – not that I really expected it to be that easy.
Thanks in advance!
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3 Replies
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Encore’s Blu-ray implementation is somewhat rudimentary, and doesn’t support multiple video streams playing back simultaneously. The only way to do something close to this in a “switchable” format from Encore would be to use its subtitles, which are pretty much the same as in the DVD-Video format.
Otherwise, to display this kind of finesse would require you to burn everything into the video, which of course means you would not be able to switch it off.
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The Blu-ray Graphics and Menu layers are much more powerful than DVD, and are capable of frame-rate animations of fairly large graphics, though not not full screen. And with Java, you have even more power. But there are no inexpensive tools yet to tap these capabilities, and even with the high-end tools it is a tremendous amount of work.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com -
Pretty much the conclusion I regretfully came to, after digging deeper into it. Plus, it seems that Encore’s own subtitle capabilities do not even render in the resolution specified by the video asset; SD seems to be the default.
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