The affordable and good subtitles application for FCP

I used FCP plug in for subtitles to create subtitles in FCP. When I made a DVD, I saw blurry background behind subtitles. Subtitles themselves look fine. They are probably OK for average viewers, but it bothered me because my job is quality control for Blu-ray.

Is there any affordable software that can render subtitles with the same image quality of normal DVD or Blu-ray? I want to submit my project to festivals but my production budget is extremely low...I would rather place subtitles by myself instead of asking professional company to do spotting and rendering.

Thank you in advance.

Andreas will surely chime in here, and i hope he does cos compared to him i don't really know what i'm talking about

it;s my understnading that you can creat subtites DIRECTLY in DVDSP,
or rather you create them in FCP or whatevere, and give intructions of sime sort to DVDSP, (an STL file, i think) and it will then have a subtitle track that you can turn on or off.

this subtitle track may look better that one you burn into your film.
it's "1st generation" rahter than being burnt into your film nad then having mpeg comprssion thrown at it to boot.

however, the font could be some bog standard thing that you cant control??? I dunno.

i dont know you make them either.
however i know that if you DO make them in FCP, then you can use a Tool that Andreas makes call Title Exchange Pro to convert that info into an STL file.
[www.spherico.de]
[www.spherico.de]


cheers,
nick

Hi,

Here I am.

Even though Nick says that he doesn't know really about those things he is right.

Burned-In subtitles are always affected by compression. The compression artefacts are not really controllable as they depend on the differences of subtitle and actual picture. With "Burned-In" there is no difference between "pre-rendered" titles from external applications and those created "on the fly" with Final Pro. The only difference is that kerning of fonts might be better with with external apps, you got control of the fonts and maybe have a better workflow when it comes to spotting and collaboration with other companies.

The important thing is NOT to use burned-in titles if possible. You can use them in FCP to check timing, spelling and some basic kind of appearance. You even can render them out as images without the underlying picture to insert them somewhere else.

As Nick said with any DVD (not data DVD) subtitles can shown on the fly. Also DCP (Digital Cinema Projection) does allow this. As these subtitles are not part of the image the image won't be affected. The drawback of this is that you only got a partial control of the font types.

I you need "Burned-In" subtitles make sure that your format before DVD compression is not DV25 as this format would create those well known artefacts.
You should convert the actual movie to Photo-JPEG or ProRes, then insert your titles and compress for DVD from there.

Hope this helps
Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

This is worrying. Years ago i worked on Discreet Edit and back then the subtitles were sublimely good. That is a big issue I have with FCP is titles.

Hi Phil,

This is not an issue of Final Cut Pro itself - it's a codec or compression issue.

As I wrote some weeks ago, one of my customers is one of the major players in the film league and they use FCP only for creating subtitles - all other editing and CC is done on Avid and other Windows based software.

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

So if I want to create subtitles separate from FCP, how should I place them in DVD Pro? How can I find out timecode of each subtitles tiff in FCP and how can I play them with perfect timing in DVD Pro? Is there anyway to export TC of individual subtitles tiff in FCP and use these TC to place tiff in DVD Pro?

Thank you in advance.