What Are Supertitles?

Supertitles are dialogue the audience can read while watching an event.

With supertitles the audience can simultaneously read what's being said or sung without taking their eyes off the performers.  This is because the text is displayed above or next to the performers.

This is distinct from subtitles where the text is displayed below the performance and often on a seat-back close to the spectator.

Serious theater and opera goers have always studied the script or libretto in anticipation of a performance.  Many would follow along during the performance -- often annoying others in the audience with a flashlight.

Supertitles got their start when opera companies discovered they could increase attendance and engage dozing spouses by projecting the text above the stage.  The first supertitles were simply slides projected from the back of the hall on a piece of white painted plywood.  Black text on a white background worked best.  The glare from that white background was awful, but the audience loved having the captions.

Projected Supertitles (Surtitles) Came First

Lots of clever people tried to make the projected supertitles (surtitles) less intrusive.  Some tried to get rid the annoying light beam from the back of the hall with rear screen projection, but it took so much space that it got in the way of lighting and sets.  Others improved on the painted plywood screens by using special lenticular screens which don't scatter as much light.  Still others invented elaborate projectors to fade captions on and off instead of simply flashing them up.

But surtitles still had some nasty drawbacks.  The projectors where hot noisy behemoths which required special slides.  Making one slide for each supertitle is a costly process.  A slide set for a single show has hundreds of slides.  Once a slide set was made it could become a creative straight jacket.  Any sort of change -- a new interpretation, different translation or alternate script -- means new slides.  Changing the slide set is an expensive and slow process.

Countless audiences are inadvertently amused by an out of sequence, upside down, or backwards slide.

And slide projectors are useless for spontaneous events which aren't scripted far in advance.

These problems and the advent of powerful video projectors made the next jump in surtitling technology.  The balky slide projector and costly slides were replaced with a video projector and one of the many presentation software packages -- such as PowerPoint.®  As a bonus, stenographers and typists could caption spontaneous events by simply projecting their computer screen as they typed.

But the video projectors are also expensive, hot, and noisy and horribly inefficient.  LCD projectors lose nearly 50% of the light because the pixels are so small and the wire traces between them are so large.  DLP projectors lose 10% to 30% due to spaces between the mirrors.  All that lost light translates into heat and very expensive light sources.  And there still is the problem of light scattering and the distraction of light beaming from the back of the hall.

A bunch of us got frustrated with the supertitling systems we'd used.

We'd heard that without supertitles at least 5% of the opera audience would quit.  But, the projected supertitles (surtitles) were simply too intrusive.  It was like a locomotive headlight looming above the audience.

The creative side was frustrated with the rigidity of the caption slides -- and never hesitated to let the production folks know it.  And we had some choice words for the balky projectors and washed out text.

Electronic supertitles looked like the perfect solution.  Fortunately, our opera association agreed and our first electronic supertitle system arrived.  In pieces.

No kidding.