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feeling: ?
listening to: Arashi - Pikanchi Double
Heh, it seems this blog has become a journal of... well, as the Japanese would call it, "my boom." I get into spells of keeping update logs here of whatever it is I happen to be most into at the time. For almost a year it was my D no Arashi translations; now, it's my D no Arashi fansubs. Wow, I'm a geek.
So now I've had the weird idea to describe my fansubbing process, even though I know no one really cares and it's not like I need to keep an instruction sheet because I obviously know how to do it now. >>; I could style it as a tutorial for other aspiring fansubbers, but I think there are enough of those out there already; of course I wouldn't have gotten anywhere without them *bows to Nya and Stormy Team fansubbers*. But what can I say? I'm weird.
So my subbing process has the following steps: scripting (I named that one myself >.>), timing, typesetting, quality checking, and encoding. This doesn't count the translating stage since I finished all those beforehand; the scripting stage is where I take one of those translations and sort of reformat it into a script that can be timed, with the dialog broken into pieces that will show up as individual lines in the final product. For example, a block such as this...
VO: The five Arashi members will act as the reporters for Document Press Arashi to present thorough documentaries on things that you often hear about but practically never see in real life - such as the moment when the bandages are removed from a patient who has undergone cosmetic surgery. They'll also report on things we only realize we want to see after hearing about them, like what's inside the box on a policeman's bike. They'll present thorough documentary reports using these two themes.
...turns into this:
VO: The five Arashi members will act as the reporters for Document Press Arashi
VO: to present thorough documentaries on things that you often hear about but practically never see in real life -
VO: such as the moment when the bandages are removed from a patient who has undergone cosmetic surgery.
VO: They'll also report on things we only realize we want to see after hearing about them,
VO:like what's inside the box on a policeman's bike.
VO: They'll present thorough documentary reports using these two themes.
By, the way, that's from the first episode, and VO stands for voiceover. And scripting is fairly quick; it takes about as long to fix one script as it does to watch the episode it goes with, maybe a little longer.
Anyway... the finished script then enters the timing stage, in which I load it in my subbing software (Sabbu) along with the soundtrack wav ripped from the respective episode, an set the exact times for each line to specify when they will pop up in the video. This is the longest and most menial part of the process, but it's weirdly addicting. Once you get moving, continuing is as easy as just selecting the next section of audio, hitting the capture button, and repeating until complete. This is the stage that gets exponentially harder when the guys get into their habit of talking over each other, which means I get a lot of overlapping lines. Brats...
So after timing I move on to typesetting, which is just as menial but a little more fun since it involves pretty colors. >> I open the timed script in Sabbu along with the respective video file so I can see what each line will look like when it pops up on screen, and set the font type, colors, sizes, positions, etc. Along the way I've learned a few pretty fun tricks to play with in this stage, like splitting a line of text horizontally into multiple colors and skewing a line diagonally (tricks that can be seen in some of my fansubs from ep. 18 onward >>). Anyway, typesetting is probably the quickest stage (besides encoding), but my method takes a little more time since I assign different font colors to almost everyone who appears in an episode, and also use varying sizes and positions for random notes and whatnot that pop up throughout the episode. Also, the main font I use doesn't include certain special and unicode characters, so whenever a ~, °, ♥, or anything like that pops up, I have to duplicate the line it's in and assign a different font to it (usually Arial) to make it show up. The drawbacks of freebie fonts...
Anyway, this gives me a complete softsub file, which I can view in WMP or Media Player Classic to watch over the episode and make sure everything looks right (quality check) before encoding. Encoding is the easy part - I just load the video in VirtualDub, set the compression to the latest DivX codec, add my logo and the softsub file, and save it as an avi. Then I send if off to my quality checker, and when she gives me the OK, I let it sit in its folder and forget about it until the time comes to upload it and share it with the rabid fangirl masses. :P
Oh, and because I'm weird, I do all this in blocks of five episodes each - meaning I transfer five raw episodes from my DVD-R backup to my Fansubs folder, then fix all five scripts, then time all five scripts, then typeset all five scripts, then encode all five scripts, then transfer the next five raw episodes from my DVD-R... etc.
As for current progress, I am just over halfway through timing episode 31. And this five-episode block is gonna be funnnnn cause it's where the Ni no Arashi project begins. *snicker* Nino's an evil little brat.
...I guess that's it for my fansubbing process. Now it's 4:30 am and I'm still wide awake... I knew I'd regret that afternoon/evening nap. Grr.
comment! (1)
dragged from Becky's stream of consciousness at 9/18/2007 03:41:00 AM
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