Subtitles on AMV's?

[fairydreamergirl]

What is your opinion on using subtitles in AMV's? And I don't mean the subtitles in an episode used for the video. For example, I'm currently working on a magical girl AMV with Uninstall by Chiaki Ishikawa and the scenes I'm using is supposed to fit with the english translation of the lyrics, and I was going to put the translated lyrics as subtitles in the video since some scenes may not make a lot of sense without it. Would it be too distracting to do this? Personally, I don't mind lyrics within the video as long as it's used sparingly and in a creative way.

[CrackTheSky]

If you must do subtitles in this way, learn how to soft-encode them so that they can be turned on and off by the viewer. I don't know how to do this, but this Google search looks like it'd be a good place to start.

I personally really dislike subs used in this way. I feel like, if you're trying to tell a story and it can only be made clear if you know the lyrics, you might be doing something wrong. Still, softsubbing a video is a reasonable answer to this.

[Magicflier]

I'd say create a version with subtitles of the translation of the lyrics, and a version without. There are always chances people out there that can understand the language of the song you are using, and they won't need the subtitles to understand that you are following the lyrics. :3