My first test of the new matching subtitles has been pretty successful, sample below (click for full size).
Things I worked on:
- The font, which is mostly Franklin Gothic Demi Cond, but you’ll see on the lowercase “g” and the question mark that I’ve modified it to look more like the theatrical font.
- The drop shadow, which is now scripted with Perl and ImageMagick (of course, one trick pony…) to look more like the solid black drop shadow of the films than the semitransparent drop shadow generated by easySUP.
- The border, which isn’t theatrical at all but is pretty much necessary if you want to read the subtitles against a white background (think Hoth). Instead of the thin black solid outline you can see in the example in the first post, it’s a thin faint semitransparent border along the northwest edge of the letters to provide some definition – much less obtrusive IMO, but still necessary.
- The blur, which you can only really see in the larger version. I blurred up the subtitles very slightly so that they appear to be part of the film itself, rather than much sharper than the rest of the film. I think this makes it look much more seamless.
I may decide to do more things, but I’m actually very happy with how this test run looks.
Please note that none of these changes are going into the regular subtitles–just the ones that are supposed to look like the burnt-in theatrical ones. In particular, don’t panic about the blur, it’s not going anywhere else.
Looks awesome CatBus!