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- Created By Desbreko
Purely Platonic
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.
Rumba rumba rumba rumba rumba
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:
[Click to View Full Size]
Ooh, pretty colors.
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):
{|1c&H000000&|3c&H000000&|bord5|pos(551,36)}The Zetsubou Sensei
{|pos(551,36)}The Zetsubou {|1c&H1E74D6&}Sensei
{|1c&H000000&|3c&H000000&|bord5|pos(646,78)}Drawing Song
{|pos(646,78)}{|1c&H23C3E4&}Dr{|1c&H2E8A08&}aw{|1c&HDFD113&}ing {|1c&H950D12&}So{|1c&H851273&}ng
{|q2|fs26|1c&H000000&|3c&H000000&|bord4.5|pos(378,446)}Lyrics by|NHisamoto Natsu
{|q2|fs26|1c&H2C4AA0&|3c&HA5B6DA&|bord1.5|pos(378,446)}Lyrics by|NHisamoto Natsu
{|q2|fs26|1c&H000000&|3c&H000000&|bord4.5|pos(662,446)}Lyrics by|NHisamoto Natsu
{|q2|fs26|1c&H198255&|3c&HA7CEBC&|bord1.5|pos(662,446)}Lyrics by|NHisamoto Natsu
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.
One more, of the title screen:
[Click to View Full Size]
Damn, that is a sweet drop shadow.
And, again, what I put into Aegisub for that:
{|q2|b1|bord0|fs28|1c&H000000&|3c&H000000&|1a&HAA&|3a&HAA&|fad(230,221)|pos(33,96)}[{|fs22}Goku{|fs28}] {|fs30|bord2|fsp4}Sayona{|fsp1.5}ra|N{|r|1c&H000000&|3c&H000000&|1a&HAA&|3a&HAA&}
Zetsubou Sensei
{|q2|b1|bord0|fs28|fad(230,221)|pos(39,87)}[{|fs22}Goku{|fs28}] {|1c&HE4E4F0&|fs30|bord2|fsp4}Sayona{|fsp1.5}ra|N{|r}Zetsubou Sensei
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.
Honey Trap
The Des decided to do encoding this time. (And more fansubbing.) I saw a torrent for an ISO image of the Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep1 DVD and figured I'd grab it to see if I could turn it into a decent h.264/AAC raw. So, for the last few days, I've been looking up lots of info on DVD ripping and encoding.
Most of the time I spent was on figuring out how to properly turn telecined frames like this into progressive frames like this. Also, there was a lot of telecining on the characters' lip flaps that the IVTC (Inverse Telecine) filter didn't match correctly, probably because of it being such a small area and only happening for single frames at a time. So I got to go through and watch everything really closely to find all of those frame and set manual overrides for them in the filter; I kind of wonder if there's a better way to do it, but I haven't found any info about it yet.
I also learned how to encode variable frame rate video, since the IVTC process brings the frame rate down from 29.97 fps to 23.98 fps (i.e. one out of every five frames is deleted). That's usually fine, since the video was originally 23.98 fps anyway and the frames you're decimating are just duplicates—except in some smooth motion scenes where there are no duplicate frames. In those cases, decimating the frames results in some slight jerkiness. So what the variable frame rate does is leave those sections at 29.97 fps to retain the smoothness of the motion. Learning how to do this was actually a lot simpler than I thought it would be.
But I'm sure most of you don't care about the technicalities of encoding, right? Here, have a picture of Nozomu with a pumpkin on his head.
The crazy amount of text, and thus the amount of typesetting that would be required, in Zetsubou Sensei intimidates me more than a little but I still asked Dagger if she wanted to translate to produce subs. She basically went, "lol okay," (I <3 Dagger) so, yeah, we're subbing it now. At this point, I honestly have no idea when it'll be done, given that Dagger is currently busy with midterms and there being the aforementioned crazy amount of typesetting to do. So far the OP has been subbed, and I'll start working on the ED soon while waiting for moar translated script.
YOU are SHOCK
The Des decided to do fansubbing again. As I've mentioned to some people already, about a week and a half ago I poked Dagger about translating the Lucky Star OVA. I got the first part of the script a week ago and today we released the finished sub; not a bad turnaround time for a forty-two minute episode with nearly seven hundred lines of dialogue and a bunch of signs to typeset, I think. I'm a little disappointed that EnA beat us to release by mere hours (especially since I think our release is better >_>), but whatever. Like the previous Aria episode we subbed, I wanted to do it primarily for ourselves so I'm not too concerned.
As for the OVA itself, it's obviously awesome—it's Lucky Star, after all—but it's also got several points of greater awesome. First, Kagami being forced into Hatsune Miku cosplay, which I have dubbed Kagamiku. This is too moe for words. Second, the whole MMORPG chapter. We never got to see the MMO that Konata plays in the series but they animated the in-game scenes this time. And, finally, Lucky Channel—in live-action. I would say more but I don't want to spoil its awesome.
My Aria the Animation box set arrived a few days ago and I've fallen in love with the series all over again. I've only watched the first DVD (ep1-4) so far, since I was busy with subbing and all the new fall anime starting, but every moment of every episode is pure bliss.
Speaking of the fall season anime, I've been and will continue to post thoughts in Shinmaru's Fall '08 Anime Season thread over on OtakuBoards rather than here, so check that out of you want to see what I'm watching. Though I need to make another post and update my list again.
Isogashii Isogashii
Lots has been going on lately but I've been too lazy to post about things individually.
Two chains please, extra heavy.
I hired two new moderators on OB recently; congrats to Korey and Darren who joined us in the Arcade and Theater, respectively. Picking out new staff almost always takes a long time and this was no exception. It's also a rather boring process so it's become one of my least favorite parts of being an admin. But it's one of the most important parts of my job, so I do it anyway and take satisfaction in knowing I play such a central role on the site.
It's funny, though, that even after I became an admin, but before I took over hiring new staff, that I never really thought about what was involved in it. So when James came along and said, "Hey, I'd like to put you in charge of hiring," I was just sort of like, "Okay." Then when it came time to actually find some new mods I was like, "Oh snap, I see why he doesn't have time for this anymore." But it's worked out nicely since I do have the time, even if I find it boring compared to other stuff I do.
Walk outside and you'll get cancer. No, really.
As some know, I went on a short vacation with my family over the fourth of July weekend to the Eureka area on the coast. We went partly to escape the smoke that has been covering most of northern California for weeks now. It's been clearing up lately but for a while it was so thick here that visibility was reduced to only a couple hundred yards. I don't think there had ever been another time in the summer here when I couldn't see blue sky for a week straight.
The vacation itself was a mix of fun and not-so-fun. For some reason both my and my mom's stomachs decided to be a pain after we went out for dinner on the fourth so we ended up having stomach cramps instead of watching fireworks. That was certainly not a good trade. But our visit to Fern Canyon the next day was a lot of fun and we took some nice pictures, which I may get around to posting later.
The Des does fansubbing.
There was a DVD-only bonus episode of Aria the Origination that was released a few weeks ago in Japan but, after waiting a while, it seemed no was was going to sub it. And, since I'd rather not have waited who knows how long for the R1 DVDs to see it (the first season of Aria is only now being released in the US this September and Origination is the third season), I found a raw and managed to get Dagger to translate it for me.
I had never produced any subtitles or worked with Aegisub (the best open source software for creating ASS format subtitles) before but I learned fast. And, for a first time effort, I think I did a pretty awesome job. It was an interesting experience, though I don't plan on doing any more subbing unless another similar situation presents itself or Dagger wants me to sub something.
We released the episode publicly since there weren't—and still aren't—any other subbed releases by the time I finished. Look around and you should be able to find it if you're interested in seeing our work.
You need to go watch Slayers nao.
The new Summer season anime started around the beginning of the month so I've been picking up some new shows. The highlight of the season is Slayers Revolution, which marks the continuation of the first three Slayers TV series after eleven years, so that's totally awesome. And I couldn't be happier with Revolution; it's staying incredibly true to the series' roots while featuring some nice upgrades in the animation and music. In addition to Slayers, you can read my opinions on the other new shows I'm watching in the Summer Anime '08 thread on OB.
You know what you doing. Take off every sig.
I've been working with boothten in organizing signature of the week contests on OB. The current winner will get a little SOTW graphic in their member title, which I'll be handling since only admins can edit titles. Hopefully it'll be another fun, ongoing project for the graphics people out there and also a way for others to get involved in the Art Studio forum through voting on the signatures.
Adam: im thinking about implementing chat on theO
Everyone should be aware of theO's impending chat room launch by now. I was involved in testing it, which was fun. I made Aaryanna cry by trying out the warn feature on her. (And then I did it again later. Aren't I horrible?) And I'll be there for its launch tomorrow at 9:00 PM Eastern Time (6:00 PM Pacific Time for me), helping out with moderation whenever I happen to be in the chat.
I look forward to using the chat to find more people to own in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Boku wa makeru wake ni wa ikanainda!
