Fansub Experience
October 28, 2008 - 19.08
Last week I took on a somewhat unexpected project – fansubbing the anime One Outs. Fansub is basically a term used to describe subtitles of video create by fans. It’s very common with animes. Having said that, there wasn’t any One Outs fansub release since it aired in the beginning of the month. (There is now and that group is a bit bitter about us releasing.) This anime is created by the more or less same team (mangaka excluded) that made Akagi and Kaiji which both my friend, backlash, and I enjoyed. He was particularly enthusiastic about the series and really want to watch it. Unfortunately the only subs we found was Chinese ones, which he couldn’t read. Therefore, I decided to translate it. He joked about releasing the subs at first but we ended up actually distributing it.
Being a long time support of anime fansubs, I knew it was hard work to make subs but I didn’t realize it was really THIS time consuming. Translating the 20minute episode takes from 4-6hrs. Maybe my Chinese nor English just isn’t that great. I had a tough time finding the correct adjectives to describe the words in the Chinese subs. Also, this anime is somewhat about baseball so I had to figure out what the Chinese baseball terms were saying. And even had to consult Kyph on “Americanizing” commentary in a game. Then there’s also the subs that didn’t make sense. I had to download a different Chinese sub and compare. There’ll be lines that are translated completely different between the two Chinese subs. This is when our Japan correspondence, Missa, come into play. I record the audio of the sentences and she’ll ask her Japanese colleagues. Also, at some parts, notes have to be added to explain some terms in the video although, I’m kind of against them because it covers up more area of the screen. I think we’ll be keeping them to a minimal.
After the initial translation, it was timing, which means to time the translated line to the correct period in the video. Thank god there is software that simplify that process. We used Aegisub which has an audio analyzer. This makes selecting the time period of a particular sentence much easier. Then comes the endless editing. Changing some words to make the sentences smoother. Picking out typos or grammar errors. The timing and editing job is shared between backlash and I. Bupo helped out in editing a bit too. During the editing, we also added in the typesetting, which is to translate any Japanese settings in the video and place them inline.
For episode 1, backlash tried to encode the video into a smaller size than the raw file we obtained. That failed. Therefore we only muxed the subtitles, chapters into a mkv container and ended up with a 400MB file. Typical HD files is around 350MB but what can we do? Before releasing, I quickly threw together a website for our group on my own hosting so we can post about our subs. Then backlash made the torrent and uploaded it onto NyaaTorrents, which is the tracker we were using. Almost immediately, someone posted it on Tokyo Toshokan, which is a torrent library for Japanese media. Distro (distributing) was a big problem for us since both backlash and I have terrible upload speeds. It took a very long time to get the first copy of the file out. I had to get another friend, Luffy, to help out with the torrent seeding. We were quite overwhelmed with the response at first. A lot of people started downloading it. There were over 2500 downloads in the first 24 hours.
Since then, we’ve received a lot of thanks and offers to help out. We got ourselves an encoder and a typsetter now. Someone put a xdcc bot in our IRC channel and an admin from an anime distribution site, Anime Me offer to host direct downloads of our episodes on his site. We’ve released episode 2 now as well as a version 2 of episode 1, based on feedbacks from those who have watched it. The plan for now is to finish the series. Some have asked us to sub other series. I can only shrug and say that’s not really possible time wise.
So far, on torrents, there had been around 4000 downloads of episode 1 and about 500 downloads of version 2. As for episode 2, it’s sitting at 3000 downloads now. It seems our first fansubbing efforts is a success.
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