Subtitle Format Suggestion

[Temprasphere]

Okay here is my idea:

I am constantly struggling with the subtitles on screen clashing with the text already displayed behind them. In some cases I have to pause the video to be able to read the subtitle.

My suggestion is that any subtitle text that is displayed on screen is still displayed in the current colouring but given a black box as background. Regardless of what is behind the text, we will be able to read it clearly.

The other suggestion along with the first is that each subtitle line that is displayed is preceded with " Hamada: " or something like that.

Opinions? feed back? fire away!

[soudou]

This is just me but I tend to use a thick white borders and a black drop shadow under the text, so that regardless of the text underneath being dark or light, it should stand out a bit from either, though it's definitely more easily read when not overlapping. I also don't always adhere entirely to the on-screen colours, e.g. I might use a darker green for legibility than the bright eye-piercing neon green they sometimes give Housei.

There are times where I've done a colored box that matches the box behind the Japanese text or a semi-transparent box.

I think a pitch black box behind everything would actually distract me from the rest of the image, but if you grab the soft subs (.ass file) you could add such a black box.

Open the subtitle file in Notepad and under [V4+ Styles] you have lines like this:

Style: Hamada,Arial Narrow,62,&H008B2013,&H000000FF,&H00FFFFFF,&H00000000,-1,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,6,9,2,10,10,10,1

Those two bolded in red, change to &H00000000 and 3 and you should now have a black box behind the text. Though I could be wrong, I only quickly tested it.

I think the colour coding is great at giving me an idea of who is speaking without having to spend extra time reading names every line, but again a custom edit might be:

Open the subtitle file in Notepad and do a Find and Replace e.g.

Hamada,,0,0,0,,

replaced with

Hamada,,0,0,0,,Hamada:

Should begin every line spoken by Hamada with Hamada:
again only quickly tested this though, and don't forget to put a space after the : so it's not like
Hamada:Hey