Bah! I’m a sucker for talking about subtitles, are you kidding? Normally nobody wants to talk about such a boring topic.

So for a sub-free version–nothing pre-made exists (not in the Harmy-quality league anyway) that I know of. However, Harmy does maintain sub-free sections of his DeEd’s to share with, for example, the Krieg der Sterne people, so that they have a blank template on which to make their own burnt-in subtitles. I believe it was also going to included as an extra on the hypothetical Blu-ray. But you’d have to splice the video together and re-encode it yourself, though.

I can’t give you exactly what you’re looking for, but there is something else about the graphical subtitles you may be interested to know. There are some utilities in the project that allow you to “reframe” the subtitles–make them fit into a differently-sized video frame. For example, for Puggo’s 16mm preservations, you need to scoot them in toward the middle of the screen about 4.5% so that they have about the same position within the video frame. Well… if you feed the utility a number like -100% instead of 4.5%, it scoots the subtitles away from the middle of the screen, as far as they can go, right into the black bars.

The problem is that subtitles that were already shifted to the top of the frame are adjusted into the top black bar. So to work around that, there’s another utility you could run first, designed to modify the subtitles to work on video that doesn’t have burnt-in subs, and that will shift the alien subtitles back down to the bottom.

So you run the unshift subs utility to put the alien subs on the bottom, the reframe subs utility to put them in the black bars, and you’re almost there… except you’ve still got burnt-in subtitles and also the crawl subtitles are still in the top black bar, so no, it’s not exactly what you want, but you gave me an excuse to talk about it.