Creating subtitle TIFFs
by Benn Gunn
on
Sep 5, 2006 at 7:37:15 pm
I'm authoring a project which requires a few subtitle tiffs to be displayed one piece of video. I'm fine creating a script for Scenarist to import all my tiffs, but I'm having trouble creating the tiffs themselves.
I know I need to get the text to have the appropriate indexed colours so Scenarost can map to them. I tried using the method we use for creating highlight tiffs for menus 9converting a tiff to indexed colours, assinging the four colours for the highlight to use and converting back to RGB), but that gave me a really indistinct subtitle when displyed.
Is there a particular font that I could use to optimise the above method? Or should I be doing it an enitrely different way? Obviously getting them done by a subtitling supplier would be easiest, but I wanna know how to do this myself for small projects of this kind.
Re: Creating subtitle TIFFs by Bouke on Sep 8, 2006 at 12:35:56 pm
What i do is render them in my own render engine to 24 bit, but if you can script Photoshop you'll be fine too.
Here is the trick:
Create the titles (in RGB) on a pure white BG, with 168, 168, 168 grey font and add a pure black border.
If you must, scale them to the desired output resolution.
Next, apply the DVD Subpicture plugin from Chris Linke. http://home.comcast.net/~c.linke/dvdsub/ It will map the colors to pure colors, giving you one color for anti-aliasing between the border and the text. Map the colors in your DVD authoring application where you set the anti-aliasing to grey 100%, and you have the best possible titles.
