Rupee Shards

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Created By Desbreko

Oh hey, remember this?

Nope, Dagger and I's version of Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep3 isn't dead yet. I got the OP translation from her a few days ago and did the karaoke timing for it. This was a fun bit to time:

Click to view full size.

Yes, that's two lines being sung at the same time. I had to time some syllables just by finding the gaps between other syllables since I could barely hear a few of them. But hey, it worked.

Beautiful Day

Yes, I'm jumping on the bandwagon for this post. But it's amazing how much anime-related stuff I've done today, yet none of it was simply watching anime.

First up was creating the SRT version of the script from the ASS script for Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2, which is the last thing I do before release. (Since you want the SRT script based off of the latest version of the ASS script and that gets tweaked throughout the quality checking.) Easy enough, since Aegisub has a handy-dandy line selection tool that makes picking the dialogue and lyrics lines out from among the typesetting lines simple. Then it was just a matter of exporting them in SRT format and doing a quick check through the episode to tweak some stuff.

So, finally, the episode has been released! A big thanks to Dagger for translating every little bit of text in it. And I can't believe I actually typeset all of it... On the plus side, ep3 looks like it will be substantially easier to typeset since two of the three chapters in it only have minimal amounts of on-screen text. Well, minimal for Zetsubou Sensei, but it will probably seem like a walk in the park compared to ep2.

After that I played Rock Band 2 with my brother for a while, which is the only thing I've done so far today that was not anime-related. Unless you count eating a delicious hot pepperoni and mozzarella sandwich. But even then, I was muxing together an h.264/AAC encode of GSZS ep3 while I ate... Anyway, RB2.

My brother seems to have gotten fed up with trying to play drums on hard so lately he's been playing expert guitar instead. Which is fine by me, since that means I get to play drums instead – I always thought I'd enjoy drumming, since I have good rhythm, and I was right since I'm enjoying it more than the guitar parts. Guitar is still fun, of course, but drumming just feels awesome when I'm banging away and thumping the bass pedal and nailing every beat. I've been getting noticeably better (especially in getting through more complicated fills without breaking multiplier) and can play nearly every song on hard now, but there's still a long way to go before I master expert difficulty.

Next up was preparing stuff for the Anime Club. In case you missed it, well, you missed it; voting for next two anime we'll be watching, that is. We ended up with a three-way tie between Escaflowne, Ichigo Mashimaro, and Kanon and I rolled a die to determine which two would be picked. And I know they were the two I voted for, but I swear it was chance that Ichigo Mashimaro and Kanon ended up winning the rolls. It still feels a bit wrong, though, since those were the two I most wanted to watch while, on the other hand, I'm not a fan of Escaflowne so I was kind of hoping it wouldn't get picked. Please don't hate me, Miss A.

To go along with Kanon being chosen, I decided to download Exiled-Destiny's DVD rips of it to replace my old a.f.k. TV fansubs. I'm still debating over whether to watch it subbed or dubbed during Anime Club. I've watched it subbed before, obviously, but have not heard the dub at all. The main thing I'm wondering about is whether or not Ayu's "Uguu~" is preserved in the dub... What do you peoples think?

Finally, I retimed the Shugo Chara ep74 script to my re-encoded raw (transport streams where?), which ended up taking both more and less time than usual. More because there were a ton of cross-fades between scenes in this episode while subs were being displayed, so to make it look nice I had to time a bunch of fade effects on the subs to match up with the scene transitions. There was also a bit of typesetting to do – there usually isn't any of importance in Shugo Chara – which was sort of a slap in the face after finishing GSZS ep2. But less time overall because I was doing this late at night/early in the morning and thus was not in chat, thereby increasing my efficiency by, like, 50%.

And guess what! I still have a few episodes to write about for my next week in anime screen shots post. It never ends.

Enjoying the Process

Work on Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2 is very nearly complete. I just finished the typesetting so next I'll be doing pre-release stuff like making the chapters file and producing a typesettingless SRT version of the script, then quality checking to make sure everything works correctly. If all goes well it should be ready for release early next week.

Also, here's some more screens of my OCD typesetting. Right now the ASS script stands at 2346 lines, compared to 1170 used for ep1. That's freakin' crazy.

Believe in Me Who Believes in the Earthquake

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.

In Despair Once Again

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!