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DVD Features Seen and Envied: Fargo and Men In Black
Two things I’ve seen that have always stumped me in trying to reproduce are:
FARGO – there’s a Trivia track that runs with text popping up on the screen, but they fade in and out in their own semi-translucent background with styled border. I have no idea how that’s done, either via alternate angles or subtitles (the DVD player I saw it on refused to let me change either during playback).
MEN IN BLACK – One of the running commentaries features black shadow outlines of the commentators a la MST3K. This ran as one of the subtitle tracks, which begs the question: how the heck did they insert a black & white video into the subtitle track, and how can I do that?
If anyone knows how these were done, I’d love to find out, and would be doubly happy if I could do them in Encore 1.5.
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3 Replies
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[Quentin] “but they fade in and out in their own semi-translucent background with styled border.”
Sounds like the subpicture effect option in Scenarist. AFAIK, there is no other DVD authoring application that has this feature.
[Quentin] “the DVD player I saw it on refused to let me change either during playback”
When the disk was authored the User Operations you tried to access had been turned off so you could not over-ride the intended effect. Encore allows you to allow/prohibit various User Ops.[Quentin] “features black shadow outlines of the commentators”
Are they fluidly animated or pretty much static? If it is fluid then my guess is it was done in post and is displayed by using an alternate angle. If it is a static or jumpy animation then it might have been done with subpicture tracks. It could possibly be done with Encore by using image-based subtitles (see the User’s manual).Hope this is interesting if not helpful.
Dave
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That’s what surprised me so much about the Men In Black feature. It was one of the subtitle tracks (you could arbitrarily turn it on or off while the movie was playing) and it was fluidly animated.
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The subpicture feature with the running commentary was done by Cinram POP in Santa Monica and undoubtedly was authored using Scenarist. Extremely time intensive as all of the movement you see is individual frames. I believe you can find a similar feature on the Ghostbusters DVD
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