This is just me but I tend to use a thick white borders and a black drop shadow under the text, so that regardless of the text underneath being dark or light, it should stand out a bit from either, though it’s definitely more easily read when not overlapping. I also don’t always adhere entirely to the on-screen colours, e.g. I might use a darker green for legibility than the bright eye-piercing neon green they sometimes give Housei.
[hide:uq12dw37][img:uq12dw37]http://i.imgur.com/iv80Iy0.jpg[/img:uq12dw37][/hide:uq12dw37]
There are times where I’ve done a colored box that matches the box behind the Japanese text or a semi-transparent box.
[hide:uq12dw37][img:uq12dw37]http://i.imgur.com/OChXx4q.jpg[/img:uq12dw37]
[img:uq12dw37]http://i.imgur.com/oTDq99O.jpg[/img:uq12dw37][/hide:uq12dw37]
I think a pitch black box behind everything would actually distract me from the rest of the image, but if you grab the soft subs (.ass file) you could add such a black box.
Open the subtitle file in Notepad and under [V4+ Styles] you have lines like this:
[quote:uq12dw37]Style: Hamada,Arial Narrow,62,&H008B2013,&H000000FF,[b:uq12dw37][color=#FF0000:uq12dw37]&H00FFFFFF[/color:uq12dw37][/b:uq12dw37],&H00000000,-1,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,[b:uq12dw37][color=#FF0000:uq12dw37]1,[/color:uq12dw37][/b:uq12dw37]6,9,2,10,10,10,1[/quote:uq12dw37]
Those two bolded in red, change to &H00000000 and 3 and you should now have a black box behind the text. Though I could be wrong, I only quickly tested it.
I think the colour coding is great at giving me an idea of who is speaking without having to spend extra time reading names every line, but again a custom edit might be:
Open the subtitle file in Notepad and do a Find and Replace e.g.
Hamada,0,0,0,
replaced with
Hamada,0,0,0,Hamada:
Should begin every line spoken by Hamada with Hamada:
again only quickly tested this though, and don’t forget to put a space after the : so it’s not like
Hamada:Hey