Subtitle issues in DVD Studio Pro

After a lot of experimenting, we have settled on the following subtitle settings for the NTSC and PAL versions of the DVD.

PAL: Helvetica Bold 34pt
NTSC: Arial Bold 29pt

We found that when we used Helvetica Bold for the NTSC version, the lower case "w" was a lot smaller than the other letters and looked very odd. Also the dot on the lower case "i" was not clear so it looked more like an "l".

We also liked that the top stem of the "t" was angled down a bit, making it a bit easier to read. Going back we might have used Arial for the PAL version too but we didn't have the time to test it.

For Persian text we found that the only good way of getting subtitles to look good was to do them in Photoshop -- one by one. We used a black font with a bold yellow outline, saved it as a png and imported into DVDSP. This will show up as a white letter and black outline. Make sure the outline is thick enough.

To do this for both NTSC and PAL:

1. Create the subtitle at 1024x576 (PAL 16:9). White background, black letter, yellow outline. Make sure to create guides for the title safe and keep the subtitle within this area.

2. Keep the subtitles in a separate folder and save backups--you'll use this set of subs to create the compressed NTSC and PAL subtitles.

3. Once you have all of the subs do a batch convert of them and resize them to 720x576. This will give you the PAL subtitles.

4. The do another batch conversion of the original set and resize them to 720x480. This is the required size for NTSC.

As far as our timing between the subtitles, we used a 4 frame gap -- but in retrospect we could have used 3 or 2 if necessary. It was also a happy accident that we did all of this on the PAL timeline (at 25 frames per second) and we were able to use the exact same stl file for NTSC. We didn't test this but I'm pretty sure that DVDSP would cough up an stl file for a PAL project that used the 29 frames per second timing.