A quiet place 2 subtitle issue

[Sonus]

We rented A quiet place 2 yesterday to watch as a family.
The movie has some sign language some of the time but there are no subtitles when the characters are using sign language, does anyone know of this issue?
Do I need to enable something for that to work?

In the middle of the movie, we had no choice but we move to iTunes and watch it there and we were able to see subtitles when needed on iTunes they show up when needed without us needing to do anything.

Any advice?

 

[andy]

You likely need to engage one of the English subtile tracks. One will show subtitles for everything while the other will only show them for the sign language.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[MikeKobb]

Hi Sonus. Sorry to hear you had this issue. I forwarded to our content team, and they're trying to figure out why you would not have seen subtitles. We do have a default subtitle track assigned for the movie. Would you mind shooting me a PM and letting me know:

1. Which version of the movie you were watching
2. The serial number of your player or server (so that we can check system logs)?

 

[Sonus]

DM sent, thanks for the help.

 

[Sonus]

Mike,

I still didn't hear back from anyone, can you post a status update here?

 

[MikeKobb]

Checking.

 

[MikeKobb]

Sorry about the delay. I heard back from the content team that they checked both 4K versions of this movie and verified that subtitles did play automatically as expected. It's possible that there's something about your system configuration that is different from the system that was used to test it. I'm going to ask for somebody to take a bit of a deeper dive to see whether that's a possibility.

I assume that you didn't purchase the movie after renting it, right? (So you're not able to try playing it again.)

 

[Sonus]

Sorry about the delay. I heard back from the content team that they checked both 4K versions of this movie and verified that subtitles did play automatically as expected. It's possible that there's something about your system configuration that is different from the system that was used to test it. I'm going to ask for somebody to take a bit of a deeper dive to see whether that's a possibility.

I assume that you didn't purchase the movie after renting it, right? (So you're not able to try playing it again.)

Thank for checking, I did rent it so I can't try it again but the iTunes version on the same system played the subtitles correctly, is there any configuration in the K system I need to change to make sure subtitles will work in this type of movie?

 

[MikeKobb]

There shouldn't be, no. They are considered the "default" subtitles for the movie, so unless you have set your system to prefer some other subtitle language, they should be the ones that play.

I'm escalating internally, so we'll take a bit of a deeper look.

 

[Sonus]

There shouldn't be, no. They are considered the "default" subtitles for the movie, so unless you have set your system to prefer some other subtitle language, they should be the ones that play.

I'm escalating internally, so we'll take a bit of a deeper look.

Thanks for escalating, I wonder what happened there.
May it be that the subtitles are presented outside of the 2.40 aspect ratio of the movie? this can explain why I didn't see them if they were really presented, my back wall is black and anything outside of the aspect I play, which in this case is 2.40 will not be visible.

 

[MikeKobb]

That's certainly possible, depending on how your projection and masking systems handle different aspect ratios. For example, my setup uses a video processor to shift the active image area to the bottom of my screen, then black fabric masks the top. So anything in the letterbox area at the bottom will be cropped off digitally. I will see if we can check where the subtitles appear on this film by default.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest going to your Strato's onscreen settings page (Menu -> System -> Settings), selecting Advanced, and then making sure that "Always reposition subtitles within the movie image" is checked. This is a feature designed specifically for projection systems with screen masking.

While you're in Settings, the other thing to check would be to take a look under Language/Subtitles, and see what options are selected there. The defaults are:

• Preferred Movie Language: English
• Movie Audio: Play movie audio in original language
• Subtitles & Closed Captions: Show English subtitles when the audio is not English

 

[Sonus]

Thanks, I will check those settings when I get home.

"Always reposition subtitles within the movie image" is the key I think and I will double-check it again, I haven't changed it for sure so if the default is off that for sure will help.

My setup is using a projector with a 2.40 ratio screen and I am using a video processor to make sure every film is always displayed at a 2.40 ratio, as I rarely watch 16:9 films I will use NLS to display those movies/shows at a 2.40 ratio .
I use the same setup with my AppleTV and it works great.

Thanks again for your help solving this.

 

[MikeKobb]

Ah, I see. In that case, I think there's a strong chance that the video processor cropped the letterbox area out of the frame, taking the subtitles with it. I'm not 100% sure, though, that they were displayed in the letterbox area on this film (there's some variation in this depending on how the title is originally authored). I've asked the team to check that to see.

 

[Sonus]

As far as I know, subtitles (by default should) always appear on the image and not in the black bars. in my Oppo, you can set them down or up a little and push them away from the image but that is not the default. AppleTV does not let you change settings and the subtitles are never on the black bars.

But anyhow it would be good to know if the problem was my video processor cropping the black bars and if there is a setting in K that makes sure subtitles are overlaying the image.

 

[MikeKobb]

As far as I know, subtitles (by default should) always appear on the image and not in the black bars.

It turns out that that's not really the case. It's actually quite common for subtitles to be authored to appear either partially or entirely in the letterboxed area. (The horizontal and vertical positioning can be individually specified by the content author for each piece of text.) This goes all the way back to DVDs, and has carried through. That's why our players have the option to reposition.

One reason that the content authors will sometimes put the subtitles into the letterboxed area is that having them on a uniform black background makes them easy to read. Plus, of course, there's no risk of them obscuring an important part of the image. This approach obviously only works well for un-masked screens, but that's the majority of the market, so they optimize for the common case.

Just to close the loop on A Quiet Place 2, we did double-check where the subtitles appear by default, and they are within the letterbox bar. So, that explains why you were not seeing them. Be sure to turn on the setting to reposition subtitles, and that will prevent losing the subtitles in the future, no matter how the content is authored!