More Subtitling Madness

I've got a 90 min movie with 4 subtitle tracks (ENG, FR, IT, ESP) all imported from .txt scripts. I've got about 2000 subtitles. I'm living a nightmare.

Here is what I'm struggling with:

1. If I try to import the ST file with the indication to start at 00:00:04:00 instead of at 00:00:00:00, it SUBTRACTS 4 seconds instead of pushing them forward.
-my workaround: import normally, double-click the whole track and just drag them all 4 seconds down the timeline.

2. AE DVD2 doesn't always fully respect the time code. Some subtitle clips don't reach all the way to their "out" frame so the ST disappears too soon and others just slightly go over the "out". In both cases, these are hairline differences in how the clip is placed on the timeline with regard to its timecode. Technically, it's "there". But in reality, it isn't. And it's extremely annoying, especially when the shot changes and you get this flash of spill-over subtitle on the screen.

-my workaround: using the double-headed arrow, individually dragging each clip out and back to snap to the CTI. Did I say I have 2000 subtitles?

3. AE DVD 2 does NOT respect individual subtitle format changes.
Ex: Off-screen voice=italic subtitle
I individually changed the subtitles concerned to italics, saving my projct as I went, kept working, then closed and got some sleep. I come back to it and discover the entire subtitle tracks are converted to italics and none of the individual font changes were kept either.

I too fell into the faux italic button trap. Thinking it was a short cut when in fact you need to actually pick Italic out of the pull-down menu. But now that I see that regardless of how you change the format, it doesn't matter because it doesn't work no matter how you change the attribute.

I've had all the same error messages as everyone else in this forum, "error creating subtitles", "abnormal situation", "one chance to save". I have rebuilt the project too any times to count, redoing everything (did I mention the 2000 misbehaving subtitles?), and that takes time. Apparently too much time because after a few hours, I get the "out of memory" and/or "once chance to save" message. It's so ridiculous that I have even started saving backups of my backups.

It seems the only way to get the correct subtitles actually onto the dvd is to do everything in one fell swoop, at the risk of having it run out of memory in the process. BTW I turn off everything when using AE DVD2 and hold my breath everytime I click "edit with Photoshop" fearing memory surge and program crash. I've read all the posts here, tried the workarounds people suggest, and nothing is working. I've changed the font, duplicated and deleted tracks, reimported, rechanged, redone and resaved the project and now I'm here to vent. No. I'm here to ask Adobe to figure out the mess so we can all get back to being creative and stop being video "deTECHtives".

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I hope this helps. I was facing a problem like your topic 2. Encore was not respecting the time code. A noticed that was happening because I was doing the time code like this 00:00:00:00 and it must bec like this 00;00;00;00, that is, it must be ";" and not ":". It worked beautifuly for me. I hope I helped. Good luck.

Thanks for the info. I'll do a test to see if it helps, but I didn't specify that this is a PAL project and not NTSC and PAL uses : instead of ;. Best of luck for your work too.

I am having similar issues with Encore CS3. I think I am going to go to the next SIGGRAPH and heckle the adobe booth all day. I'll just buy a big bag of popcorn and chuck it at them everytime some adobe drone talks about some new feature and say "FIX THE FEATURES YOU HAVE ALREADY FIRST!"

I bought Encore three months ago so I could do one project, right now I am three days behind, everything is done but subtitles... after 60 minutes of subtitles are added it simply crashes during save--oh, did I mention it EATS THE .NCOR FILES WHEN IT CRASHES DURING SAVE? The files literally vanish the moment the error message shows up. I have installed it on two different machines with two different Windows OS, the error is the same on both. So I have 10 minutes of video that is impossible to subtitle, and because I can't export the subtitle track I can't just do the last few minutes in a text editor. The production and distribution folks are waiting on me and I'm going to have my reputation ruined by a stupid piece of software. I've used presentation and movie software since the PC existed, I had a copy of "Action!" the pre-cursor to Flash, and I've NEVER seen a professional product this terrible. On Monday I will be asking for a refund.
I'm seriously considering writing a DVD image, decrypting it with a hacking tool, pulling out the subtitle track, editing it, and re-importing the finished track to Encore.