Subtitling

Types of Captioning

Closed Captioning

Inserter/Encoders

Subtitling is the most flexible
type of captioning.

Where closed captioning supports English and a sort of French, Portuguese, and Spanish, subtitling using UNICODE supports all known languages.

Subtitling features:

• Proportional characters
• Encoder draws characters
• Captions are permanent (except DVD)
• Background is optional
• Variable number of characters per line
• About 12 lines fit in the image area (safe title)
• Any character or graphic can be used

As a rule, effective subtitling characters need to be a bit larger than closed caption characters.  Only 12 lines of subtitled text will fit in the space occupied by 15 lines of closed caption text.

AutoCaption supports two kinds of subtitling:

• On video
  The subtitles are burned permanently into the video using a character generator or overlay generator.
• On DVD
  The subtitles are rendered by AutoCaption and put in a file for the DVD authoring package.