Welcome to Rupee Shards, my own little world for whatever I feel like writing about. (Gosh!) For those who don't know me, I'm an administrator of OtakuBoards and a theOtaku chat moderator, and I've been hanging around here since September 2001. I'm an avid gamer and anime fan so most of what you'll see here will relate to one or the other.
Nintendo WFC Friend Codes
Wii Number: 8387-7566-7057-0450
Super Smash Bros. Brawl: 1504-5385-2566 (Des)
Rock Band 2: 4667-9521-5706
Mario Kart Wii: 4124-7294-7708
Animal Crossing: Wild World: 4553-2727-4864 (Desbreko in Kakariko)
What have I been doing the last few days? Typesetting Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2. And, um, more typesetting. And... that's nearly it. There's three chapters in the episode and the first one was a horrible pain to typeset. Unlike ep1, where there got to be more and more typesetting as the episode went on, ep2 starts out incredibly thick and gradually thins out.
This lovely little screen shows exactly how much of a pain it can be trying to find space for horizontally written English among vertically written Japanese. Or, rather, it shows how it can sometimes be flat out impossible. Have fun turning your head sideways and squinting at that schedule. I know I did.
I think this screen must take the cake for most subs on screen at once in the entire history of anime. The Japanese text in the background is moving in a spiral pattern around the kanji in the center, which is basically impossible to replicate with soft subs so we get a wall of text instead. On the plus side, they're soft subs so they can be turned off to see the original scene in all its spiral power glory if you really like.
Shots of newspapers, when they actually have real text on them, suck. They suck hard. Not only do they have tons of text, it tends to be crammed together with little or no space to fit in the English translations. And, in this case, it's at a funny angle and curved.
I don't like to do overlays and replace the Japanese text with the English typesetting but there was no other good, no decent, not even a bad place to put the list on the left. (But, again, that's the beauty of soft subs; you can always turn them off.) Getting the overlay to look decent also sucked, by the way. The lines between the text are actually a bunch of em dashes (—) in a row, using the box border setting to fill in all the space between them with black background, clipped to display only in the area of the original list and rotated to get the angle and spacing right. (And that's the simple way to go about it; if you want to use the ASS format's vector drawing features it can get even more complicated.) Then the text was placed in separate subtitles on top of that.
Thankfully most of the typesetting in the second chapter is very easy and there's relatively little in the third. I think there's only two or three scenes left that I'll end up raging at while working on them.
I've been working on Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2 lately. Here I thought encoding the raw to use in the subbing would be easier this time, since I actually know what I'm doing now instead of learning on the fly. But, no, there were complications.
Simply getting a decent raw to encode from was a small learning experience. For ep1, Freelance-RAWs put a DVD image up on Tokyo Toshokan so I grabbed that and was able to encode directly from the DVD source. This time, they put up a 1280x720 upscale, leaving me going, "WTF mates? ^^" (For those that don't know, DVD resolution is 720x480 which then gets stretched out to 853x480 for 16:9 widescreen videos.) I messed around with it, downscaled it back to 848x480, and re-encoded. It ended up looking okay but not great.
After a couple days of still no DVD image showing up on Tokyo Toshokan, I decided to go hunting for one myself. Which involved learning how to use a couple Japanese peer-to-peer programs. I tried Perfect Dark first (no, no relation to the N64 game of the same name) and found two upscaled raws, one of which was the one Freelance-RAWs had uploaded. Apparently people upscale the DVDs for playback on the PS3, since it was labeled "PS3 upscale" or something like that, though I have no idea why. Then I tried Share and, lo and behold, I discovered a DVD image! This made the Des happy but I'm still wondering why the heck Freelance-RAWs uploaded the crappy upscale but not the DVD image this time.
So now I've now got my pretty new encode which kicks the crap out of the other one I did from the upscale, with the OP and title screen subs done.
Earlier I also did styling and scene timing for the ED subs, but I still need to do the karaoke timing for them. Which will have to wait until Dagger gives the ED a look (hint hint ^_^) since I just grabbed the romaji and an English translation off the net to have something to work with and am not sure if it's correct.
But enough ranting. I know what you all really want are some juicy screen shots.
Hopefully we'll be able to get it released some time next month.
And, since I probably won't get around to posting again until after Christmas...
I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Ear!
Dagger and I's version of Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep1 is finally done and released. You can grab the torrent for it on AniRena. I don't have much upload bandwidth, though, so until I get a full copy seeded it won't download very fast. Enjoy!
Since Shin and TimeChaser did it, I started wondering who'd I put in a man-harem of my own. So, of course, I put one together. But, unlike Shin, this one had a lot fewer contenders than my other two.
If you can't tell from my picks themselves, the indifferent smartass and flirtatious playboy types amuse me. Zelgadis, Tomoya, and somewhat Leon fall into the first category while Baroqueheat, Shuichi, Takumi, and somewhat Fay fall into the second. Leon is kind of a male tsundere who actually annoyed me the first time I watched Kaleido Star but then grew on me my second time through. (Plus his hair is awesome.) Shannon is more the quiet badass type with a sister complex who practically takes on the world in her defense. And Fay is just all kinds of fun.
By the way, the Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei subs are coming along nicely. I'm about half way done with the typesetting and should finish by next weekend. If all goes well, I'm hoping to release around the 12th.
gg released a sub of it yesterday but it looks like it's missing a lot of typesetting and they instead opted to go with external notes for the rest of the text. Their release is also cropped a little more than my encode, but otherwise they look nearly identical. Not a bad release at all, as expected from gg, but ours will have nearly every little bit of text translated and typeset.
Work on the Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei subs has been going smoothly. They're still early in production, but I got the OP and ED done after two agonizing days of karaoke timing. I'm glad to have the most tedious and boring part of the process out of the way at the start, though.
Yesterday I started working on the typesetting, which, while there's a crap-ton of it, is at least more fun than timing. Timing is, really, quite boring except when the dialogue happens to be so good that it can even make me laugh as I'm timing it. (This is one reason I would never be able to stand subbing a show I didn't like a lot.) Typesetting has actually become my favorite part of the subbing process, it can just take a while to make it look good. Here's a little preview of the opening screen:
And here's what I put into Aegisub to do that, not counting the regular options for that style (with the blackslashes replaced with vertical bars because apparently Worlds fail at displaying blackslashes):
Aegisub is nice because it has a great interface for typesetting like this, but it still takes a bit to match fonts and colors and pretty everything up nicely. For example, because you only get one border per line, each piece of text there is actually two lines overlayed on top of one another to create a double black and white border.
Like the black borders in the first shot, the shadow is its own line set behind the text and it required a ton of override tags to change its color and transparency values.
Though there's a lot of it, thankfully most of the typesetting in Zetsubou Sensei is fairly easy. Really, any text that's stationary is pretty easy. It's when you start needing to make text move or change size/rotation at irregular speeds or patterns that things get tricky.
