What Happened to My Subtitles?

You’re running a foreign language film and your subtitles are nowhere to be found.  There are several possible causes for this problem.  Here’s a few to check out.

Are you running the correct version of the film?

The CRU drive that your feature was delivered on often carries several versions of the film.  Make sure that you are showing the subtitled version.  Below is a screen capture that came from a server.

In this case, there are two different versions of the film on the server.  The highlighted text is the section of the DCP title that shows the language and title information.  In this case, the top listing is for a print that contains an Italian dialogue track and has English subtitles.  The bottom listing is for the same movie without any subtitles.

Don’t confuse subtitles with captions.

Subtitles and captions are two distinctly different things and are not interchangeable.  Subtitles are for a foreign language film.  They are identified in the title block as illustrated above.  The first two letter group is the dialogue language.  The second group is the language of the subtitles, thus a coding of EN-FR would indicate an English language movie with French subtitles.  If the second group is XX it means that there are no subtitles available.

Captions are for the hearing impaired.  They are either superimposed by the projector onto the screen or sent to a separate personal appliance to be used by the person with the impairment.  Captions are indicated by either CCAP or OCAP in the DCP title.

Is the film in the proper format?

This is the tricky one.  To understand this one, you must understand how the digital projector handles the different formats that are in common use.  The references to pixel counts refer to a 2K projector.  We’ve put the 4K projector equivalents in green for your reference.

Your digital projector contains three imaging chips (called DMDs) that create your image.  Each of these DMDs controls one of the three primary colors of light; red, blue and green.  The imaging area of these DMDs is 2048x1080 (4096x2160) giving it a native aspect ratio of 1.9:1.

In normal cinema usage we generally use two primary image formats; FLAT and SCOPE.  Currently FLAT is defined as 1998x1080 (3996x2160) pixels.  In simple terms, this image uses most, but not all of the available pixels width wise and all of the available rows height wise.

In SCOPE we use the entire width of the DMD chip and crop the height to achieve the 2.39:1 aspect ratio, currently defined as 2048x858 (4096x1716) pixels.  The accepted definition for HDTV is 1920 x 1080 (3840x2160) pixels.

A less common format sometimes used in “art” films is referred to as 1.33:1 (actually 1.37).  This aspect ratio is most accurately done by using an image 1479x1080 (2959x2160) pixels.  The downside of doing this is that while you are using the full height of the DMD, you have substantial blank on each side.  If your screen masking only goes to 1.85:1, you will have a black letterbox on either side of the picture.

Sometimes an exhibitor, or even a distributor will attempt to make a 1.33 print fit the FLAT aspect ratio.  This is essentially putting a square peg in a rectangular hole.  The image would be zoomed to fit the width of the flat picture but in doing so the height increases proportionally and ends up overshooting the height of the DMD.  The content that would have been on those areas, such as your subtitles, are lost.

We have seen DCP’s come in, particularly foreign, art or remastered old films labelled as FLAT only to find out that they were actually a 1.33 format.  This was the case of the Italian film referenced at the beginning of this article.  If you reference the illustration, it states that it is a FLAT (1.85) film but was actually shot in 1.33:1.  In that instance it was most likely that the subtitles while on the print, were outside of the projected area.  As an aside, the current way of noting that in the DCP title would have been F-133.

1. Am I using the subtitled version of the print?
   
2. Is the moving being projected in the correct aspect ratio?