subtitling

[Jasper Sharp]

Michael,

(Apologies to the rest of the group if this gets a little technical or goes
beyond the scope of the list...)

I'm putting up a trailer of my current project on my website
www.synaesthesia-productions.com by the end of the week. I can't imagine it
would appeal to many people on this list as it's a documentary about Spanish
exploitation director Jesus Franco (just done for my own interest really,
and as a test case for later projects using Adobe). As per moment the site
is still very much under construction. 
However, feel free to take a look at the end of the week as it will give
some indication of the quality. Bear in mind that I was capturing from video
at a resolution of 640 * 480. The resulting captures were then edited and
rendered at a size of 280 x 208. I then converted them to RealPlayer format.
Thus the image has somewhat deteriorated, and also was pretty much at mercy
of the quality of some of the source videos. What I can do is make available
one of my original (full screen) captures later this week. 

As far as projecting on a big screen goes, the CODECs available now will
allow higher resolution than what I am using (mine is being rendered
explicitly for the web and for video), though this will obviously increase
the size of the file.

Hope this helps. If you need any more help, don't hesitate to ask.

Regards,
Jasper


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Raine [mailto:mraine at umich.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2000 2:01 AM
To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: RE: subtitling


Jasper,

Could you post a short clip from your project somewhere? I'd love to see how
digital video looks when done properly. When I tried digitizing some tape a
couple of years ago the quality was pretty horrible -- I could barely view
it on the monitor and couldn't imagine projecting it for a class. The
quality of the originals is already marginal for that purpose so I'd like to
avoid losing any definition if possible. Also, defining each subtitle
separately took much longer than on SubViewer or Sub Station Alpha. I expect
most people aren't interested in projecting these films though, so perhaps
digitizing and either recording to tape or distributing as a digital file
would work.

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
[mailto:owner-KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu]On Behalf Of Jasper
Sharp
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2000 4:17 AM
To: 'KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu'
Subject: RE: subtitling


Premiere is perfectly adequate for the process. Admittedly you have to spend
the time typing in the subtitles in the first place, but this is going to be
a problem in any case.
I have a full version of Premiere, so I'm not sure what features are
disabled on demo copies, but I imagine that basic functionality such as
image capture and titling should be there. As for degraded image quality, I
think at worst you would lose a generation. I'm currently making a brief
documentary using clips taken from VHS releases, and the quality is fine - a
little blocky, but the colours are still retained.
The only major consideration is to make sure you have a big enough hard
drive to hold 90minutes of video data: you're looking at a minimum of 10gb.




2: it takes a lot of equipment -- Avid editors are not cheap! Even using Sub
Station Alpha requires a genlock and the results aren't that impressive.
3: it's extremely time consuming. I looked at using Premiere to make
subtitles -- perhaps there's other, specialist, software.
4: digitizing a VHS tape, adding subtitles, then recording back to VHS
degrades the image 	quality.
5: once done, the subtitles aren't modifiable without going over the whole
process.
6: Europe and the USA (and Japan etc) use different VHS standards.