AviSynth scripting help needed

I'm in the process of doing burned in subtitles for Greedo in SW and are wondering if it is possible in AviSynth to apply a little drop shadow behind the text? and if that is possible, how exactly do you make it or is there maybe some info regarding this sort of thing on the net someone can point me to, any help would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance.

The built-in subtitle filter (documentation here) can only do halos, not drop shadows. You could however use it twice, once with a black text colur, then the second instance in white text and shifted up/left a pixel or two.

Or there might be a drop shadow effect in one of the external filter plugins.

Ah, I see. I think I'll try out the first option you suggested then, it seems like it should work. Thanks for your quick answer and suggestions!

Am I correct that VobSub can also be used with avisynth to accomplish this?

I know it can be done with VDub, avisynth should work in a similar manner.

Yes, VSFilter (TextSub/VobSub) is a subtitle plugin for AviSynth and VirtualDub.

Moth3r said:

The built-in subtitle filter (documentation here) can only do halos, not drop shadows. You could however use it twice, once with a black text colur, then the second instance in white text and shifted up/left a pixel or two.

And I thought this would be an easy task... ;) Excuse me if my questions sounding stupid here but I'm a complete amateur when it comes to Avisynth. I simply cannot understand how you fine adjust the positions of the subtitles in frame, it seems there's only x and y values for left, center, right and top, baseline and bottom, not small pixel adjustments. Do you have to change the horizontal or vertical size of the frame in the script somehow to make that happen? I have the same problem with this specific line of dialogue:

I can't get it to align in the center of the frame, only the second bottom line. It must be possible, right?

Well, this was more complicated than I thought ;) maybe I'll just use your old script and drop in TradeGothic...

msycamore said:

... I simply cannot understand how you fine adjust the positions of the subtitles in frame, it seems there's only x and y values for left, center, right and top, baseline and bottom, not small pixel adjustments.

(x, y) positions the text by pixel coordinates, unless you set either of them to -1 in which case the text is centred. If you check my script you will see that for most of the lines I centred x, and set y manually:

subtitle ( \
text="Going somewhere, Solo?", \
x=-1, \
y=370, \
first_frame=70663, \
last_frame=70698, \
font="Franklin Gothic Demi Cond", \
size=36, \
text_color=$ffffff, \
font_width=10.5 \
)

When you centre x by setting it to -1, the align parameter defaults to 5 (center/baseline). If you want the fine pixel adjustments, you will have to set x manually - in this case, the align parameter defaults to 4 (left/baseline).

For the two-line text you show above, I had to set x manually, as otherwise both lines would end up centred horizontally instead of starting at the same indent position.

Thanks for the help, Moth3r! I did it right after all, don't know why it didn't work before but I tried to reinstall avisynth and all of a sudden it worked out. :)

Your suggestion for layering two subtitles on top of each other turned out quite good actually, looks much better than with just the halo. Thanks.

Moth3r, or someone else for that matter, is it possible to set the black level/gamma & tweak the color/hue for specific scenes within the Avisynth script? or do you have to set the same values for the whole film.

I'm currently working on improving my subtitle-script for Star Wars and I've tried out a suggestion Doctor M gave me a while back, which was, add the subtitle-part before the anti-aliasing part in the script. And the results were much better. :)

But, I'm wondering if there's a way of doing that without completely reworking my subtitle work so far? cause if I place the anti-aliasing and resizing after my sub-scripting as it now stands, it alters everything in it, size, positioning etc.

It would be nice if there is a way around it, I'm using g-force stabilization script BTW.

If it isn't a way around it, I'll just redo them from scratch, because the result is much more pleasing to the eye. But if there really is a way, it would spare me from a lot of additional work.