So just another seeking feedback thing: we’ve got preservations going on at all sorts of resolutions. Puggo’s doing NTSC DVDs, Harmy’s doing 720p with 1080p on the horizon, and definitely-not-negative1 is doing 4k with likely 1080p downscales.

I really prefer graphical subs and will always pre-render them and include them, but they do inflate the size of the project files. So… which resolutions? I’ve been doing 1080p native, with 720p and NTSC downscales, and that’s gone okay. But the second I start even thinking about 4k, you know what that’s going to do. Not to mention the render times – 1080p takes my poor computer over a week to render all the subtitles.

At the moment, here are my thoughts: eventually 4k native subtitles make sense. You can downscale to any resolution you like from there. At that point in the future, I’d probably do 4k native with 1080p downscales and finally say goodbye to 720p and NTSC. But right now, there are too many projects at those lower resolutions. So I’m thinking once the full DeEd trilogy hits 1080p, I’ll make the switch. In the meantime, I’m pretty sure upscaling 2k subtitles to 4k should look and work just fine*, at least on software players. However, if people are burning UHD discs, they might have to have matching resolutions.

I am currently retooling all my scripts so that they will work with 4k. I just don’t see any particular need to render at that resolution just yet.

* Apparently there are lots of issues with using soft-subtitles on 4k media, due to HDR, where they come out too bright. I don’t believe any of this is related to that.