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Author Topic: Chinese subtitled DCP Jordi Aguila Film Handler Posts: 29 From: Barcelona / Spain Registered: Feb 2017 posted 03-22-2018 06:26 AM                     Hello, I'm going to generate an interop DCP with chinese subtitles. Anyone knows if there is anything that I should know to generate this DCP to don't have problems when the DCP will be screened? I'm thinking that will be better to generate a burnin subtitled DCP to be sure that all will work fine. What do you think? Recomendations?... Thank you.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 03-22-2018 09:33 AM                        My memory on this is a little hazy, but if it's right, Interop only supports ASCII characters in subtitles, without serious hassles. If I read this document correctly, you'd have to package the Chinese font along with the subtitles in the DCP, and then call each character with Unicode references, in order for it to work in an Interop / Series 1 environment. I'm sure that it's technically do-able, but IMHO, burnt-in will save a world of pain at the DCP mastering stage, and avoid any risk of the subtitles not displaying properly (or at all), even if your DCP ends up at a theater with 10-year old Series 1 equipment that has never had a firmware update. There are also potential subtitle problems with Series 1 TIs that are still on a firmware version earlier than 15.1, too. Everything says to me to burn 'em in, especially if the DCP has to be Interop.  |  IP: Logged Jordi Aguila Film Handler Posts: 29 From: Barcelona / Spain Registered: Feb 2017 posted 03-22-2018 11:15 AM                     Thank you Leo, I'll generate a burnin subtitled version, I don't want to have headache about this and the weight of the DCP is around 90gb I can put into the hard drive without problems 2 OV DCPs 180gb (the clean and the chinese subtitled version) and then additional packages with the other subtitles languages. Best!!  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 03-23-2018 06:35 PM                     I did do a timed text chinese subtitled short a while ago. Took me a while to get the bits and pieces together. After some research, I used a windows chinese font file (SimHei) I think and shrunk it with TI fontcompressor so the DCP would play on series 1 electronics as well. It's always troublesome to create something you are not able to qc accurately on your own. In this case, we needed to supply an OV with around ten different language subtitled VFs , and did not want to break that scheme for the chinese version. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Yinghong Wu Film Handler Posts: 32 From: Suzhou Jiangsu China Registered: Apr 2012 posted 03-26-2018 09:12 AM                     YES，burn the chinese subtitle in is the right way.  |  IP: Logged Dennis Fung Film Handler Posts: 11 From: Kwun Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong Registered: Jul 2014 posted 04-07-2018 02:07 PM                    If you don't wants burn-it subtitles. I have two suggestions for VF. 1. Create a XML with Font File, and compress it. I strongly suggested 華康中黑體 to avoid any problems. Because others Chinese fonts can't compress it under 640KB. Don't use SimHei / JhengHei, especially if you creating Trad. Chinese subs. It may caused tons of problems. 2. Just create XML with PNG images. No more font files problem. But you should aware PNG scaling problem...Especially 2K and 4K projectors. If you not really familiar with screening venue. Don't use PNG. Except if you need bilingual subtitles.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 04-07-2018 05:48 PM                     I looked up my project notes. The trouble here of course is that normally, you shouldn't do subtitled DCPs if you can't evaluate what you did, so, in general, it is certainly good to have a native speaker of the subtitle language in question as assistance. In this case, it was relaxed, as we had a graphical representation of the intended look of the chinese subtitles, checked by the person who created the subtitle file. So we could verify that the projector rendering matched our check prints. All I can say is that it worked for this 20min short under the given conditions. The transcription system was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo. We tried different fonts available on the internet and found that SIMHEI matched our checkprint. We created the subtitle xml file, then fed both the subtitle xml and the SIMHEI font into T.I.s font compressor. That shrunk the 9.2Mbyte original SIMHEI.TTF file to a mere 30kBytes. That of course is just for this specific subtitle file and can't be generalized. The resulting short played okay in all 10 timed text subtitled versions on both a Sony 4k as well as on a Barco series 2 DLP machine. We couldn't check it on a series one projector ourselves, but had someone with a series 1 barco play it and compare it against the check prints, and he confirmed it played okay there as well. Again, this is just my experience with this specific project, and it sure is possible that we were just lucky. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 04-08-2018 03:40 PM                     quote: Dennis Fung 1. Create a XML with Font File, and compress it. I strongly suggested 華康中黑體 to avoid any problems. Because others Chinese fonts can't compress it under 640KB. Don't use SimHei / JhengHei, especially if you creating Trad. Chinese subs. It may caused tons of problems. Can you maybe explain what kind of problems you've experienced with SimHei and especially JengHei? We've had some projects in the past were we used the JengHei font, which did compress pretty well given the subtitles at hand. The JengHei font was, in my opinion, favorable to the SimHei font, because it contains Western glyphs with correct kerning (spacing between the letters), whereas western text written in SimHei looks like it contains random spaces. Since the TI compressor only compresses the glyphs actually being used in the subtitle, the resulting font is often just in the range of kilobytes rather than megabytes.  |  IP: Logged

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