Hi, I am hoping that we can get a new "Subtitle" feature which lets us click a box in stage mode so that subtitles are generated automatically from character voices (into a top-most image layer) from whatever the characters are saying, please?

We would need to be able to choose:
1) Our custom STYLE & Size Fonts (eg I use OpenDyslexic Size 36 for School Educationals as shown in my "Miss Chalky"
Sample Scene below)

2) Font Colour (I use pale chalk, or company colours, whichever is easiest on eyes for client ages and auditorium lighting) because white or black text is often hard to see, or harsh on eyes in some lighting.

3) Any colour background band to go behind the subtitles (eg I usually use black for schools & Film Festivals, clear for universities, or for corporate gigs, I use any dark colour which matches the company logo of my client at the time)

4) Any position, eg bottom of screen (or top), so they can be moved to prevent hiding any action on screen.

5) Any L & R margins to keep text from being too long in a subtitle

6) Any Offsets within the subtitle band, eg central, left justified or right justified

7) Ability to customise 1 line of text or 2, before spilling to next subtitle at the end of a whole word

7) An Optional Background Band, of any Custom Width, or Auto Variable Width, (or FIXED Full Screen Width as shown in attached sample).

8) A choice of custom edges for the Background Band. (Eg the attached sample has a custom lacey trim edited in photoshop, but a plain black band with a shadow onto the animation is also very effective for some presentations).

And we would need to be able to:
9) Automatically keep the Subtitle Image Layer at the Top

10) Be able to name and re-arrange our image layers to find them easier in our projects with other image layers

11) Use a double-clickable settings panel in Stage Mode (similar to text bubbles), so we can edit spelling, punctuation, pacing, colours, fonts, margins etc to ensure that the end result is professionally perfect (including choice of American or Commonwealth spelling).

Note: This would be helpful for:
* Anybody who makes educational films
* Anybody who enters Film Festivals which require all subtitles to be in English
* Anybody who makes films for the deaf communities
* Anybody who speaks with a strong accent, which makes them a little difficult to understand
* Anybody on Youtube who needs to comply with the in-coming World Wide phase-in of Mandatory Subtitles

Yes, Youtube already have an ability to auto-create sub-titles in order to comply with the phase-in, but their subtitles are ugly, unprofessional and full of errors which are horridly time consuming to fix.

At present, I create all of my subtitles in post-production editors, (and each time to suit the specific style of each film), but being able to create them directly inside CA4, (with at least some degree of auto-generation) would be hugely more efficient, professional and more accurate.

And since CA4 can already handle text to speech in English, I am hoping it is a small step back in the opposite direction..?

Please also note:
The CA4 text bubble shown in the attached sample is for demo purposes for this suggestion. But bubbles cannot (yet) be customised with opaqueness, colours or shadows to better-suit our scenes either, so I would not normally use them in any scene for a client. Instead I usually create and animate my text bubbles manually at present too.

But hopefully these suggestions for Subtitles and maybe also Text Bubbles will be popular enough to be worth considering for inclusion in the near future.

And in iClone too, perhaps?

Cheers and best wishes in any case.