WHAT THIS GUIDE'S FOR: i wrote this little guide just for helping people that have problems importing subs in scenarist. I will not cover all the aspect of the process so you have to read all the other good guides on doom's site (or whatever) before coming to this. I will help you only to make the final adjustment for making your subs look just like they where in the original movie.

Ok. I got this problem with conversion of "Final fantasy: the spirits within" (PAL, Italian version).
I was trying to reduce the size (in MB) of a special (the storyboard version of the movie), it has 4 subs and they are different each other.

I was not able to obtain good subs, some of them was covering all the screen. I tried to act on the scenarist settings (see picture on the right) but i was only able to change the color only globally (for all the 4 sub tracks) using the color palette, and the contrast picture by picture. Yes, scenarist has a "Set as default" button in the edit object window (select the video track in scenarist, then choose View\Simulation window , in the new window that appear, choose View\Edit and in the Edit object window choose Subpicture and Highlight) but seems not to work for me.

For these example i will explain you how to change the settings only for a subtitle stream, but you can apply these infos to all the other sub's stream the same way.

These are the subs how they look like in Powerdvd (click on the images to enlarge):

Sub 1 & 4 have a layer transparency, sub 2 & 3 are quite normal subs.

These are the images of the 4 subtitle extracted with subrip using scenarist settings.

Every sub has a different layout, specially sub 1 & 4 that in the movie looks very similar now they have completely different aspect.

And these are the subs how they look like in scenarist, once they are imported in it (click on the images to enlarge).

Has you can see sub1 has a E2(Color1) grey and 100% of display color (so no transparency). In the original movie the color is different and the grey part of the sub is 40% transparent.
The 4th sub is covering all the screen with grey color, wich means that E2(Color1) needs to be removed.

Now export to script file in scenarist, choose File/Export

Open it with a text editor, i suggest Ultraedit (www.ultraedit.com) cause it has a very powerfull option that lets you replace a string of text only in a selected part of the opened file.
Search the script till you find this section:

That's the start of the first subtitle stream, each sub stream is made of a long list of each image composing the stream; each image could have different color and contrast settings. Just scroll down few lines the script file and you'll find the settings for this first sub-image (eng1.2.bmp).

Color=Color
{
Color 1(E2)=9
Color 2(E1)=3
Color 3(P)=4
Color 4(Bg)=3
}
Contrast=Contrast
{
Color 1(E2)=100 %
Color 2(E1)=100 %
Color 3(P)=100 %
Color 4(Bg)=0 %

What they mean? It's quite simple, remember the images of the subs in scenarist? The image on the right is the first sub how it looks in Scenarist.
So Color1(E2)=9 means that the E2 color is the 9th in the color palette, the grey.
What we want to change here is the E2 Color and contrast; remember the original sub in Powerdvd? the first sub had a different color and it was quite transparent. We gonna choose color number 8 (in color palette is the most similar to the original) and a transparency of 40%. I will leave P Color to 4 (white) cause i prefer it.

In Ultraedit select all the lines for the first subtitle. You have to find the next subtitle stream, it starts with "Item=Data Folder" (see picture below). Look at the image name (ita2.1.bmp), it's different, so it's the second sub stream.

Once you have selected all the lines that cover the first sub streams you can use the Ultraedit function replace.
Click on the button, a window will pop-up (see right), be sure to check Selected text, then replace all the occurency u want and you're done.In this example i changed Color 1(E2) from 9 (grey) to 8 (kind of green).

To change the contrast just change Color 1 (E2)=100% to the percentage you prefer. Be sure again that Selected text is checked and then hit Replace all.
WARNING!! you can't use every number here, scenarist accept only certain percentage of transparency (0%, 7%, 13%, 20% 27%, 33%, 40% ... and so on) if you put in there 45% you not gonna make any changes.

Save the text and reopen it in scenarist (choose new from script when starting the program).

So let's have a look at the final results.

At right you can see how the first subtitle stream now looks in scenarist.

I changed only the E2 color and contrast, not the P color that still remains white, despite the original one was kind of blu (see original sub image) or whatever.

That's all, hope you understand the way i act and that this could be helpfull to someone.

For any suggestion just contact me at mogan@inwind.it

Byez
Mogan