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General Forum / Re: How did you get into fansubbing? (Fansubbers only)
« on: November 19, 2008, 05:52:03 am »Yes, I believe there is a thread on this already ^_~
Where is it? I couldn't find it.
Anyway, in my case I was hanging around with some guys from the local anime club who happened to be subbing Future Boy Conan. We were doing it from LD source, running it through a nice (though composite) genlock to a JVC HR-S3800U (IIRC) S-VHS editing deck. The year was 1993 -- if you've seen Future Boy Conan subbed in English (even the recent digisub releases from Pazu), it was probably our scripts.
Unfortunately, a hard drive crash claimed the final edit versions before they were released. Yes, there really was only one copy. Networking (especially a LAN in the home) was not common back then. Floppies were, but we were idiots. After the crash, we hooked the Amiga up to the Linux box in the house via a null modem and got them connected using SLIP. After that, the files were sent via FTP to the Linux box where revisions were kept in RCS. And we made copies, too.
But the damage was done. By that time there was nobody in the group that wanted to go back and re-edit and re-time the affected episodes. So if you thought the scripts were kind of crappy, you were right. They were a far cry from what we had at one time.
I (as were all the others) were editor/timers. Back then there were only two jobs: translating and not translating, so nobody really bothered with "job titles". For the record, the guy who wanted the subs done (somewhat well-known comic book publisher) supplied the LDs and paid for the translations. So we didn't have a translator... or at least not one that could be consulted when a question arose. This wasn't a huge problem, as nobody spoke Japanese enough to notice any problems.
I started taking Japanese in January 1994, and that's why there might be romanized versions of the OP lyrics on some of the later eps. (I can't remember if those were lost as well, or if we never timed them and put them in, or if they did make it in and I just forgot. I didn't actually feel like watching it again at all until probably 2003 or 2004.)Now excuse me while I put my teeth in.
You new-fangled fansubbers with your computers and your Intarwebs and your video COdecs and your big 2 GIGABYTE hard disks really have it easy! Back in my day the timing was the hardest part!
What you did was you played the source through, and you'd hit the space bar to bring a title up and take it down. Some groups (like Arctic Animation) stopped there; the result was usually watchable, but was not what anyone would consider "good". Once you had the rough timing, you'd make a timing tape which is just like what it sounds -- a tape with both script lines and time code laid down. Then you'd play the tape and figure out which lines were late or early. When you found one, you'd rewind the tape and rewatch to try to spot what time it should come on. And rewind and rewatch, and rewind and rewatch, and ...
OBTW, the timing of the output always depended on starting the script playing at the proper sync point. So if you screw up a little making your timing tape, you need to screw up in the same way when making the final copies or the timing will be all shifted. (Actually, it was tunable on the fly but was still a PITA.)
So if you care about the quality of the output, you can see that you'll be watching a given ep many, many times in tiny 20 second increments. The VCR transports were slow. In short, timing could be a tedious and painful. (As an aside, I also once spent an hour or two getting the title flash in episode one of Moldiver to match color changes in the script. Similar to the wipe in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUn-5JxRFgM">this clip</a>. Yes, it was just like primitive karaoke styling. And it took forever.)
And because we cared about things like correct starting times, scene bleeds, and stuff like that, timing was very, very painful. So painful that after it was done, nobody wanted to watch it, let alone do it some more.
There was no video timing -- capture was feasible but expensive in terms of both hardware to do the capture and hard drive space to store it. There was no audio compression, and the hard drives just weren't large enough to fit an entire 30-minute episode uncompressed. (Okay, at some point we did get disks large enough, but what fansubber do you know is going to spend over $1,000 just to have enough space to do one 30-minute show at a time? I didn't know any.)
There...old man mode disengaged.
Things are definitely better now.
In 2002 I stopped by an anime club meeting to drop something off with someone and saw a fansub episode (actually just the OP) of Azumanga Daioh. I couldn't believe it! And I was just watching the credits... It wasn't until I saw some of Hare Guu at A-Kon a year or two later that I started thinking about fansubbing again. And of course it wasn't until 2008 that I actually started doing it again.But in the meantime I learned me up some Japanese, so now I don't have to do timing. I am still watching parts of the episodes in little 5 second chunks over and over again, but that's kind of the exception instead of the rule now.
Was that long enough? I can never tell...
) and I still like email better. IRC is still good, though.