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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: Subtitle Engine not processing 'C', 'K', 'Q', 'J', or 'F'
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-17-2019 08:29 PM
quote: Leo Enticknap
Which is why, in the USA at least, subtitles encoded for rendering in the projector have gained such a poor reputation for reliability that the few foreign language releases that do play widely tend to have their subtitles burned in...
Versus what? Getting somebody who knows what they are doing to do the job?
I'm not saying that everybody or everything has to be perfect every time. Everybody makes mistakes. That is what it is to be human.
The point I'm getting at is that people just don't seem to put forth the effort to do things the best way they know how and they don't seem to care when things go wrong.
This causes other people to have knee-jerk reactions like "burning in" subtitles. Now, we can't turn them off when we don't want them.
The whole point of the subtitling system was to be flexible and easy to use, provided a competent operator is at the controls. But, now that we have INcompentent people upstream of us, we are forced to make changes that hamper our ability to do the job.
These people who don't care about their jobs should be forced to work on an assembly line in a factory, some place, where one little mistake can upset the whole operation, costing thousands and thousands of dollars. It's boring, monotonous, sweaty, back-breaking work, on top of it all.
If those people worked in a place like that for one month, I bet their whole attitude would change.
Unfortunately, I'm not "Dictator-In-Chief of the World" or things would be run differently. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 02-17-2019 10:17 PM
quote: Randy Stankey
This causes other people to have knee-jerk reactions like "burning in" subtitles. Now, we can't turn them off when we don't want them.
You can't turn them off when playing a CPL with projector-rendered subtitles anyways. The rationale behind having them rendered in the projector was to cut down on the volume of data on distribution drives. Instead of having to double the size of the drive to accommodate both a subtitled and an subtitled version, all you need is the unsubtitled OV and a subtitled VF, which will add no more than a couple of megabytes to the overall packages. You can also include multiple language versions, again, at very little space penalty.
I agree with you that if DCP authoring were all done correctly, and projectors and servers were all kept up to date, this problem wouldn't exist. But the reality of the situation is that the whole rendered subtitles workflow/ecosystem is highly intolerant of things not being done strictly by the book, and close attention being paid at every stage in the process (I can't think of a one-word antonym for "idiotproof," but that's what I mean). Agreed completely that people should do their job properly, but we have to face the fact that, as in most other industries, there are some in ours who don't. This is not a new problem: if it were, film prints would never have gotten scratched.
Add to that the fact that the Interop to SMPTE transition broke the ability of systems with older software/firmware to play subtitles, and the end result was that the distributors of the few foreign language movies that play to a wide audience in the US are increasingly deciding to play it safe and use burned-in subtitles.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-17-2019 11:01 PM
I get it. I fight it every day at my current job. There are idiots everywhere.
One of my responsibilities is to replenish plating bath chemistries. (Electroplating shop.) The additions that I have to make is based on the amp-hours that a bath is used. Most of the tanks (of chemicals) have amp-hour meters on their rectifiers but, for various reasons, some don't. Because of that, I am dependent on the platers to report the number of amp hours they put on a bath so that I can make the needed additions.
It's like pulling teeth!
It's easy to calculate amp-hours... Number of loads x (minutes ÷ 60) x amps. We're talking eighth grade arithmetic. But, I RARELY get correct reports when I get reports at all.
Then they (the platers) come back to me and complain because their work gets rejected by Q.C. How can I do my job when the guys upstream of me don't do theirs?
Some days, I feel like going postal!
On the other hand, the shop where I work does a lot of gold plating. There aren't many shops in this area that plate gold. It's finicky work and, due to the cost of materials, small mistakes can cost the company thousands of dollars.
They don't let just anybody work on the gold plating line. Just because you know how to plate tin and copper doesn't mean you can plate gold and silver. A new plater starts by working with tin and copper. When he gets enough experience, he learns to plate nickel and, when he shows that he knows what he's doing, he moves up to silver and, eventually, gold.
What I'm saying is like a metaphor... The movie industry has a lot of people who are barely qualified to plate tin who are trying to plate gold.
As much as I am an opponent of digital projection, movie presentation in a commercial theater is like unto plating gold.
It has to be done by competent people who can do the job right, the first time, without making too many mistakes.
Back when I was running film, people took their jobs seriously. Yes, there were wankers but they got weeded out fairly quickly. Most of the people who work with me tried to do their jobs as well as they knew how.
Nowadays, just because everything is all digital, people seem to act like things don't matter. They just do "Whatever" and, if it works, that's good but if it doesn't... "Que sera, sera."
As much as I am upset to be out of a job because digital projection replaced real movies, the thing that truly upsets me is that "Que sera, sera" attitude which digital projection has brought about and which seems to be permeating the entire industry.
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Tom Lewin
Film Handler
Posts: 6
From: New York, NY USA
Registered: Jun 2011
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posted 02-18-2019 12:21 PM
quote: Carsten Kurz
Is this DCP encrypted?
DCP is not encrypted, but I won't be back in the venue until tomorrow to double check whether it's Interop or SMPTE. If it's the former, I'll see if I can recreate the DCP and leave out the font file.
quote: Leo Enticknap
Make sure that the projector software/firmware bundle (including the ICP) is up to date, too, as that could affect subtitle rendering. The current version is, IIRC, 4.312, which includes ICP version 4.5.
Good point, this venue last serviced the projector when it was installed in 2015 (we are contracted by the venue to provide technical services, but we are not in-house projectionists). Does anyone know where I can find the latest projector and ICP bundle? If I can get the files, I'll update tomorrow so that at least both the Doremi and the NEC are up-to-date, and that can be ruled out as a cause.
quote: Randy Stankey
It sounds like a subsetting problem to me.
The media house that packaged the DCP informed me that they had no issues at another venue using a CaptiView. I'll certainly ask them if they chose the option to subset fonts, but would subsetting be consistent with the CaptiView generating its own subtitles correctly using its internal engine, and the Doremi engine not reading the subset font properly? Just checking as this will be the first time I, and the venue, are bringing in a CaptiView (which is coming with its own engineer), so I'm a bit unfamiliar with the particulars.
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Carsten Kurz
Film God
Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 02-19-2019 07:38 PM
Alright, the subtitle file uses capitals nearly exclusively, and, the font is indeed crippled.
Why they created that specific font file, no idea. It is not nearly large enough to cause issues (series 1 projectors have a 640KByte limit).
I don't believe that font reduction was based on a real job, too many important capitals missing. Maybe someone played around with font compressor and lost track of the files. Maybe they created the file for a specific short reel with only a few lines not containing these chars, and then reused the file for all reels. Whatever...
But - as we wrote above, this is for a CCAP device, so, the crippled font is not used and the CCAPs will play ok. Interesting to know though that Doremis do use the supplied font when rendering CCAPs on screen as OCAPs.
Thanks to Carl for unscrambling the file. There was a small flaw in it it seems.
- Carsten
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Antti Nayha
Master Film Handler
Posts: 268
From: Helsinki, Finland
Registered: Oct 2008
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posted 03-04-2019 02:13 AM
I recently ran into a similar case, where the ICP wasn't showing capital Q's and W's when playing a certain Interop DCP. I looked at the font file in macOS's Font Book and sure enough, the broken characters were missing, just like in Carsten's screenshot above. And a trial version of Glyphs gave some rather cryptic error messages and refused to open the .ttf at all.
However, the author of the DCP sent me a screenshot of the font on his system, and all characters were visible there. So whichever software he was using, the font bug didn't seem to affect it at all. And all hash checks were successful, so it wasn't a case of file corruption during download/ingest.
The quick & dirty solution was to remove the font file and all references to it, and rewrap the DCP, so our ICP simply used its default font.
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