Info: - Greedo & Jabba subtitles, theatrical placement and fonts - — Page 5

 

RU.08 said:

Interesting topic guys. TradeGothic seems not as bold as the font should be. I'm going to have a look at this...

 If you're able to find a closer match, I'm first in line. The one they originally used were probably never digitized, the fonts that do get digitized are also often slightly different in their appearences to their older siblings.

 

RU.08 said:

...but first let me give you an avisynth function that will make the drop shadow (you can't use -1 for horizontal sadly)....

 

 

Function DropSub(clip input, string caption, int posX, int posY, int fStart, int fEnd)
{input
#Currently set for anamorphic PAL...
f = "TradeGothic LT Bold"
f_siz = 44
f_wid = 10.5
f_lin = 25
f_spc = -2
f_col = $FFFFFF

subtitle (caption,posX+2,posY+2,fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,$000000,$7F000000,7,f_spc,f_lin,f_wid)
subtitle (caption,posX+1,posY+1,fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,$000000,$00000000,7,f_spc,f_lin,f_wid)
subtitle (caption,posX, posY, fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,f_col,$FF000000, 7,f_spc,f_lin,f_wid)
#The following line can be used view the subtitle centred...
#subtitle (caption,-1,200,fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,f_col,$FF000000,8,f_spc,25,f_wid)
return(last)
}

 

 

Then you just call it like this...

DropSub("Going somewhere, Solo?", 240,374,70663,70698)

Yeah, that looks a little smoother than my page-long scripts. ;)

^^I thought so too ;) plus I used three layers, not two :) (the third layer is love, lots of it, from anakin skywalker) tbh franklin gothic looks nicer to my eye, the main difference between that and the subs on the first page being that the serifs seem to raise above the letters... this thread here seems to indicate alternategotno3d might be the go, I'll check it out and report back later :)

-edit-

found the font :)

Okay I think this is gunna have to come down to personal preference.

Puggo 16mm reference...



alternategotno3d...


(the words are too close together for my liking)

Franklin Gothic Medium Cond (used by g-force)...


^^This was the one I liked the most, until I found this:


AlternateGothic2 BT (from the same font family as alternategotno3d), this is now my favourite :)

And here, finally, is TradeGothic LT Bold...



I also completed the avisynth script... this script assumes if you're using PAL that you purged the first 13 frames to sync it to the SE! I think they're correct NTSC frame numbers?

# Subtitle file for use with GOUT-related projects.
# Please note, I have assumed you cropped your PAL image
# entirely to 720x432, or your NTSC image to 720x366 at
# this stage (and that you are adding any black boarders
# later). Variables have been used and are easily changable.
#
# Written by RU.08.

Mpeg2Source("SW_GOUT.d2v")

ANHSubs()

Function ANHSubs(clip input)
{input

#Values for PAL
l_pos = 374
ll_pos = 327
#values for NTSC
#l_pos = 317
#ll_pos = 277
DropSub("Going somewhere, Solo?", \
237,l_pos,70663,70698)
DropSub("It’s too late. You should have paid him when you had the chance.", \
29,l_pos,70825,70933)
DropSub("Jabba’s put a price on your head so large every\nbounty hunter in the galaxy will be looking for you...", \
95,ll_pos,70940,71091)
DropSub("I’m lucky I found you first.", \
225,l_pos,71098,71137)
DropSub("If you give it to me, I might forget I found you.", \
124,l_pos,71203,71284)
DropSub("Jabba’s through with you.", \
231,l_pos,71365,71406)
DropSub("He has no time for smugglers...", \
200,l_pos,71433,71491)
DropSub("...who drop their shipments at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser.", \
19,l_pos,71500,71597)
DropSub("You can tell that to Jabba. He may only take your ship.", \
82,l_pos,71656,71750)
DropSub("That’s the idea.", \
278,l_pos,71806,71835)
DropSub("I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.", \
114,l_pos,71843,71933)
return(last)
}

Function DropSub(clip input, string caption, int posX, int posY, int fStart, int fEnd)
{input
f = "AlternateGothic2 BT"
f_wid = 10.2
f_spc = -1
f_col = $FFFFFF
#Values for PAL
f_siz = 43
f_lin = 32
#Values for NTSC
#f_siz = 37
#f_lin = 25
subtitle (caption,posX+2,posY+2,fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,$000000,$7F000000,7,f_spc,f_lin,f_wid)
subtitle (caption,posX+1,posY+1,fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,$000000,$00000000,7,f_spc,f_lin,f_wid)
subtitle (caption,posX, posY, fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,f_col,$FF000000, 7,f_spc,f_lin,f_wid)
#The following line was used to calculate the centre of the subtitles...
#subtitle (caption,-1,200,fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,f_col,$FF000000,8,f_spc,25,f_wid)
return(last)
}

RU.08 said:

alternategotno3d...


(the words are too close together for my liking)

 

Otherwise, that's the best one of those you showed, I'd say.

Ripplin said:

RU.08 said:

alternategotno3d...


(the words are too close together for my liking)

 

Otherwise, that's the best one of those you showed, I'd say.

Agreed. Maybe put two spaces or change the size.

Yes it does look the closest... now I've changed my mind!

alternategotno3d is nice, and some letters even look closer than trade, but I actually think it is slightly too bold, it would be better if you make the comparisons against the Jedi-screenshots on the first page, the 16mm - footage have the white levels blown out making it hard to see the letters true form.

# Subtitle file for use with GOUT-related projects.
# Please note, I have assumed you cropped your PAL image
# entirely to 720x432, or your NTSC image to 720x366 at
# this stage (and that you are adding any black boarders
# later). Variables have been used and are easily changable.
#
# Written by RU.08.

Mpeg2Source("SW_GOUT.d2v")

ANHSubs()

Function ANHSubs(clip input)
{input

#Values for PAL
l_pos = 374
ll_pos = 327
#values for NTSC
#l_pos = 317
#ll_pos = 277

DropSub("Going somewhere, Solo?", \
236,l_pos,70663,70698)
DropSub("It’s too late. Y", \
20,l_pos,70825,70933)
DropSub("ou should have paid him when you had the chance.", \
168,l_pos,70825,70933)
DropSub("Jabba’s put a price on your head so large every\nbounty hunter in the galaxy will be looking for you...", \
91,ll_pos,70940,71091)
DropSub("I’m lucky I found you first.", \
224,l_pos,71098,71137)
DropSub("If you give it to me, I might forget I found you.", \
115,l_pos,71203,71284)
DropSub("Jabba’s through with you.", \
229,l_pos,71365,71406)
DropSub("He has no time for smugglers...", \
198,l_pos,71433,71491)
DropSub("...who drop their shipments at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser.", \
17,l_pos,71500,71597)
DropSub("Y", \
74,l_pos,71656,71750)
DropSub("ou can tell that to Jabba. He may only take your ship.", \
86,l_pos,71656,71750)
DropSub("That’s the idea.", \
280,l_pos,71806,71835)
DropSub("I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.", \
108,l_pos,71843,71933)
return(last)
}

Function DropSub(clip input, string caption, int posX, int posY, int fStart, int fEnd)
{input
f = "AlternateGotNo3D"
f_wid = 9.8
f_spc = -1
f_col = $FFFFFF
#Values for PAL
f_siz = 40
f_lin = 56
#Values for NTSC
#f_siz = 33
#f_lin = 57
subtitle (caption,posX+2,posY+2,fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,$000000,$7F000000,7,f_spc,f_lin,f_wid)
subtitle (caption,posX+1,posY+1,fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,$000000,$00000000,7,f_spc,f_lin,f_wid)
subtitle (caption,posX, posY, fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,f_col,$FF000000, 7,f_spc,f_lin,f_wid)
#The following line was used to calculate the centre of the subtitles...
#subtitle (caption,-1,200,fStart,fEnd,f,f_siz,f_col,$FF000000,8,f_spc,25,f_wid)
return(last)
}

The position of the "thingy" on the lowercase "g" is where the differences are most obvious.

Nice to see that, the DVD format was really shitty when it came to subtitles.

here are some reference pictures

of our subtitles:

==========================

later

-1

Thanks -1! There's quite a lot of compression artifacts on those but they may be a step above the 16mm frames on the first page.

Just to clear up an minor issue, if anyone was wondering. There was some speculation and confusion (mostly on my part) regarding the original theatrical timings of the subs some time back when Verta's sample frame of the line "I've been looking forward to this for a long time." was mysteriously present one frame ahead of all other sources out there, but he told me some time ago that the probable reason the subs ended up a frame earlier was a result of his registration tool that combines sources, it was probably just offset by a frame during that test shot of his.

no problem.

we don't have another reel of this one.

so this is the only reference we have for now.

would have been interesting if we had the

spanish subbed version too..

later

-1

FWIW, I got tired of not having a good enough font match for the Star Wars subtitles, so I made a font. It’s derived from Franklin Gothic Demi Cond, but I modified the character widths, inter-character spacing, and a few of the characters themselves that didn’t match (lowercase “g” being most obvious).

The bad thing about being based on an existing font is that it’s still not perfect, and probably never will be. Kerning, character spacing, and character widths are still not quite right at an individual character level, but a complete line of characters takes up approximately the same amount of space as the theatrical subtitles (but of course this also varies a bit). Some subtler character differences are also still present – the theatrical font has a kind of boxy lowercase “e”, while mine is still more rounded like Franklin Gothic Demi Cond. But I got the g, y, r, question mark, comma, etc, so it’s certainly closer than it was before. It’s designed to work with Star Wars at regular weight, and Jedi with bold weight, since Jedi’s alien subs are thicker.

The good thing about being based on an existing font is that even if the spacing and kerning aren’t theatrical, they still look very good. Amateur specialty fonts constructed from scratch tend to have completely haphazard letter spacing, so I’d guess that’s not a simple thing for an amateur like me to do. Another good thing about being based on an existing font is that it’s complete. A font based on scans and vectorizations of theatrical subtitles would be limited to those characters. This one has a full Latin alphabet, plus Cyrillic and Greek for good measure. But this bring up another downside – accented versions of any modified characters are not modified. i.e. a lowercase y with umlauts is exactly like Franklin Gothic Demi Cond, while a lowercase y with no accent marks has been modified to more closely match theatrical.

Anyway, I’ll include this font with the inevitable next release of Project Threepio, but it could be a long time before that happens.

My approximation of the RotJ style:

Style: Default,Trade Gothic LT Std Bold,50,&H00FFFFFF,&H000000FF,&H00FFFFFF,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,105,100,-1.0,0,1,0.5,3.5,2,16,16,90,1

Use {\blur1} on each line of dialogue.

It will come out looking like this:

(Note: The fake subtitle is generated with a margin of 32 instead of 90, so that it can be seen separately from the original subtitle.)

Nice looking results–I forget how Trade Gothic deals with J, N, g, and ?. FWIW, ROTJ style seems to be pretty much the same as SW style, but I got thrown off by Despecialized’s narrower take on the font. Compared to ROTJ, SW seems to have more blur, a glow effect from light bleed around the subtitle, the ellipsis is different (probably not font so much as how they laid out the periods), and the apostrophe seems to be placed slightly higher. Other than that, it’s pretty dead-on.

Oh, naturally.

The use of blurring is something a friend pointed out to me because he didn’t like his subs looking “too digital”. Came in handy here. 😉

Hmm. I’m not so sure, after checking out some of the letters that don’t appear in this subtitle (N is the big one–it’s actually kinda crappy in the theatrical font, and I can see why nobody wanted to reproduce it digitally), and y and v both have the “too deep valley” problem that all of the close fonts I’ve found share. Nevertheless, it’s still handy for piecing together a Frankenfont.

I actually think the c’s, e’s, s’s, and o’s don’t look quite right here either.

Oh absolutely there’s little adjustments everywhere in any PC font. I hope to be able to handle everything except rounded corners and the general boxiness of letters like “o” in my custom font (still in active development, getting badly broken daily). But there’s limits. I mean, you can’t really reproduce damage on individual letters (e.g. the “u” in “he may only take your ship”) without reserving special characters for various damaged forms. But we can always do better that what’s just available in general-purpose fonts.

No sooner do I post that than I start messing with characters in the Private Use Area of my dev font. Basically if a character is consistently different, as in the periods in Jedi being flatter than the periods in Star Wars, I can see some value in making a custom alternate form of the character. And I guess you could also make them for the damaged characters like I mentioned earlier… but they’d only really have value for re-creating the theatrical subtitles, which we already have in high-quality graphical form, so IMO using PUA characters is a convoluted way of getting to the same result. The flatter periods have value in creating new text using the subtitle font, damaged forms not so much.

Also, FWIW, after reviewing it for a bit, it looks to me like the character spacing in Jedi is very regular, and easily reproduced fairly closely with a font. Star Wars looks to be a lot more haphazard, and may always be a manual job to match convincingly. For my purposes, I’ll just match Jedi and that’s good enough for me.

I’m less concerned about perfect theatrical accuracy of the subs - rough accuracy and softsubs is plenty adequate for my purposes.

Of course, I think due to software issues when I was working on the XP77 Mono disc a decade or so ago, before GOUT was a thing, I lost the subs completely.

In an attempt to avoid cross-posting, here’s an update on my subtitle font, which had a recent breakthrough of sorts–I figured out how to round the corners on the letters:

http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/910886