subtitle or menu subpicture too complex – HELP

[Frans Suijs]

just some extra info: When inporting the subtitles I gave the titles a light outline. In the timeline color set I chose almost black as a fill, stroke is 0%, anti alias 100%. The option ‘create anti …’ is not selected. I have some moving menu’s and some normal, each menu has two different highlight groups.

Frans

[Frans Suijs]

It seems the menus are not the problem. The problem starts when Encore is encoding the timelines with the subtitles. I have Chinese, Japanese and Russion subtitles, maybe they cause the problem. The project is 16:9 and I’m on Encore CS2 on a PC, XP.

Regards,

Frans

[Michael Rossmeier]

Hi Frans,

I also had this error-message… i have subtitles in 6 languages,…
We make the subtitles, export them to textfiles and import them later into the final project… working in Encore CS4…
However, I had the same problem and was searching for a solution forever… i found out that this error message appears when a line in the subtitle is too long… i tried to shorten them but was almost impossible to split sentences that much…
So i found out it’s not about the number of characters that causes the problem, but the characters being over a certain point towards the edges of the screen…

Maybe it’s the same in CS2
My workaround:
(I have a PAL widescreen project, 720×576 (16:9).)
When i reimport the subtitle-textfile, it suggests right and left borders which seem to be too wide and cause this error – so i found out that if i set them to 120 left edge and 600 right edge, it works…

Maybe it’s the same error – hope it helps…
All the best
rossi

[Frans Suijs]

Hi Rossi,

We also came to the same conclusion here. It seems that Encore has a limit of 1400 bits or something per text line. The solution for us was to decrease the textsize and then it was fine. Another problem was duplicating the original project and work from there and then duplicate once more. Better stick to the original project. I rebuilded the project on a Mac with CS4 and now it works fine!

Thanks for your reaction.

Frans

[Dave Knop]

I was having the same error; “the subtitle or menu subpicture is too complex to be encoded” when trying to burn a DVD with imported subtitles. I tried to “simplify” the titles and other suggestions from other posts (with no success). I searched forums and tried everything!

After searching and searching, I came across this post and thought I’d give it a try. Upon importing of my subtitles, I set the margins to the numbers [120 left edge and 600 right edge] in the setup menu. …And it worked for me as well!

THANKS!

I’m working with a NTSC 16:9 widescreen project.
No menus.
Adobe Encore CS3
Windows XP

[Dave Knop]

After learning this procedure of adjusting margins fixed my error, I went back and ran some more tests and tried other numbers, reducing the margin in increments of 10(to get as much margin space as possible for my subtitles) I was able to get the subtitles to burn to disc with margins set to:

92 (left) and 628 (right)

[Encore default is 72 / 648]

[Paddy Uglow]

You are a super-genius Dave!
Thanks for that. I was feeling very clever having made a spreadsheet with columns for timecodes and columns for the 4 languages I was creating subtitles for, and doing a bit of cut’n’pasting/replacing in a text editor to create importable subtitle scripts, when that pesky “too complex to be encoded” error came up at burntime and made me wish I’d maybe started in DVD Studio instead.
But you seem to be right about those edges settings. Burns nicely now with 4 subtitles (including Greek!).
Thanks 🙂
– Paddy

[Laura Soria]

Thanx to everybody!! you save me .. I was hours long wrangling with “the subtitle or menu subpicture is too complex to be encoded” … actually i was having 15 10 minutes films 4 menus and 2 subtitles tracks for each … i found this post and followed your advices and it worked but not for all of them .. 3 films and 6 subtitles tracks still were giving me problems … so what I did was to set the margins to the numbers [130 left edge and 585 right edge 70 in the top and 495 for the bottom] in the setup menu. So it works for me … As conclusion I can say that is a question to keep setting numbers in the set up menu. By the way .. someone knows if is possible to change this setup after created?
best regards

[Tiom Tiom]

Hi guys,
it seems upon me like this:
only experiment with FONT Size is the way how to solve this problem.
in practice: start setup Font size of imported subtitles at 30 points.
if problem still occurs, try to change amount to 29 or 31, 28 or 32,….
PS.: no change of margins or text encoding are necessary

[Tiom Tiom]

Hi all,
I found out the solution!
It is so simple ! Don`t setup margins just modify Font Size of each imported text subtitles.
For example> at the beginning try native 30 pt and if it does`t work, try 29 or 31, then 28 or 32, go on….
have a nice day 🙂