I've noticed when I watch a movie in widescreen that subtitles will often appear under the picture (not talking about DVD foreign language subtitles but rather titles you'd see in a movie theater, like Greedo's dialogue in Star Wars or Sean Connery's early scenes in Hunt for Red October). My question is: What happens to these subtitles when you watch the DVD on a widescreen TV and there are no black bars on top or bottom? Do they get moved over the picture (where they belong)? Or do they just disappear?

I fully expect to get a widescreen TV one day and would hate to lose all the subtitles from movies I own on DVD.

Sam

They get moved over the picture, you don't lose the subtitles.

If the disc is anamorphically enhanced, the electronic subtitles (those generated by the player, not part of the film print) will move up into the picture.

If the disc is not anamorphic, the subtitles don't move. Hunt for Red October's subtitles get cut off because of this. Star Trek VI has a similar problem.

Same thing with my Longest Day. I have to watch it in Narrow mode so I can maintian the OAR and see the subtitles.

As mentioned, if the disc is non-anamorphic, the subtitles can get cut off. If the movie is 2.35:1, I can get around this on my Toshiba 16x9 set by scrolling the picture to the top, which cuts off the top black bar and increases the bottom black bar enough to see the subs.

The other possiblitly is a scaling player, where the player zooms the non-anamorphic disc and puts the subs on top.

My question concerns the subtitles that are part of the film print.

Thanks for your responses; this is something I've been wondering about.

Thanks for starting this thread. This is something I wonder about often, and I think to myself, "I should ask about this on DVDTalk", but I always forget to by the end of the movie...

Anyway, glad to know the answer.

If the subtitles are part of the film print, they'll appear within the picture anyway. So no, nothing would get cut off.

Not true. Some DVDs do put the subtitles down in the lower black bar - HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, STAR TREK VI, the STAR WARS movies (LD & VHS releases).....

Ideally, these films would be re-released in Anamorphic Widescreen, and the studio would move those subtitles into the actual picture.

Well, Hunt For Red October is coming with a new anamorphic transfer, DTS, etc... There was a big thread about it a month or two ago.

So such burnt in subtitles would be completely lost on a widescreen TV, right?

If subtitles are burned into the black bar, they would be lost on a WS TV if the movie is 1.85:1. If it's 2.35:1, and the TV lets you scroll the picture up, you can still see them.

I think a couple of people are confused about what "burned-in" means.

If the subtitles are "burned-in" that means they're part of the image - it's as if the camera took a picture of those words - you can't get rid of them, and the player can't generate them. They're simply part of the picture information.

What some geniuses at some studios did was to burn-in subtitles into the burned-in black bars in a non-anamorphic image (meaning that the black bars are actually part of the picture information - part of the data is being taken up with the black information) and thus if you zoom in on the picture to eliminate the black bars, you'll lose the subtitles too.

This is why we love anamorphic widescreen - all of the picture data is used for the FILM, and it'll look better on a widescreen TV and you'll be able to see the subtitles!

-- Jough