a force beyond resistance

At the intersection of C-drama fandom and vidding fandom is an interesting problem: what do we do with the hardcoded subtitles that are ubiquitous in Chinese media? I just made a vid for The Untamed that made me get creative about it. This post is about the handful of approaches that I found worked really well without taking a ton of effort. 

1. Zooming In 

The obvious solution! 

Before: 

After: 

This approach is especially good for clips with quick movement because the loss in quality due to the zooming in is less visible. 

2. Masking

This one is a little harder to explain, so let’s take a look at my timeline:

See the greyed-out clip on track V6 on top of the clip on track V5, and how there’s a subtitle at the playhead? Here’s what that greyed out clip looks like on its own, if I turn off the V5 track instead:

it’s a teeny tiny crop of the portion of the V5 clip that does not have the hardsub that masks just the frames with the hardsubs. As a result, you get this:

In this particular clip, the masking is entirely invisible because the camera is completely stationary. I used this technique in several other clips where you can actually see it if you squint, like so:

you can see the line and slight change in color. However, because in this clip you’re looking at LWJ’s face and hands, you’re not going to notice this little difference in the color. 

Lastly, here’s my favorite example, and oddly enough, the most visible one:

 I wanted to use as much of this little paperman as I could. I could’ve avoided the subtitles completely if I cropped out three or four extra frames at the start of the clip, but I wanted him to go across the entire screen. Since the background is almost completely stationary and the eye is drawn to the paperman, this is totally fine to overlay across the bottom of the screen and no one will actually notice it:

Basically, this approach is fantastic when the camera is mostly stationary and there’s other movement in the clip that draws the eye. It’s MUCH better than zooming in because you preserve the quality of the footage. 

3. TBD: a combination of masking and rotation via keyframes so that you can mask across movement

You're the finest thing that I've done. (Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian, and their son.)

Baby, I can see your halo.