| Written by Kyle Barghout, on 13-02-2008 19:05 |
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These days, the methods of creating FanSubs have changed greatly from the days of recording images from a TV screen. With all the new technology available to us these days, high quality image and audio can be achieved at very little cost.
Modern FanSub Techniques
Modern FanSubs are produced almost entirely on computer, but a ‘raw’ is still required, however unlike the FanSubbers who relied on laser discs, most raw sources comes directly from recordings off Japanese TV, which are made available via Japanese peer-to-peer programs, such as Winny or Share. While TV recordings are now the primary source for raw that is found today, rips of region 2 DVDs are also used.
For older shows not available on DVD, some modern FanSubbers use computers equipped with video capture hardware to get digital copies of older analog media (laserdisc or tape) to work with. Once the video is in the computer it can be edited and subtitles applied with minimal or no loss of quality, compared to the methodology used in traditional FanSubbing. However, a majority of the encoding formats used generally cause some loss of. A relatively inexpensive PC can perform all of the manipulation necessary, without the need for expensive and complex devices such as editing decks and a genlock.
Translation is usually done solely by listening to the recording. Mostly, translators are not experienced with FanSub technology and only provide a translation. While commercial releases will often have access to the scripts, FanSubbers have to translate by ear. However, this can sometimes lead to mistakes or unclear spellings of names. The latter is most common with shows that use Western names. Because of ambiguities resulting from Japanese pronunciation and transcription of English names, names like Alice can sound or be spelled like "Arisu". This can lead to different FanSubbing groups using different spellings. A famous example is Winry Rockbell from Full Metal Alchemist, who was spelled as both Winry and Winly by different groups due to the equivalence of the alveolar approximant and alveolar lateral approximant in Japanese.
An alternative to using the raw Japanese file for audio translation is the use of video that has been subtitled in Chinese. China has their own FanSub groups that also release to the Internet. Several FanSubbers are known to translate into English the Chinese translations of the original Japanese, although this inherently reduces the accuracy of the translation because of the fact it has gone through two translations.
A recent example of a show that was FanSubbed entirely using Chinese subs is My-Otome; Doremi, one of the groups that worked on the show, used two native Chinese speakers for the project, although several translation checkers were on hand to verify against the original Japanese. In a similar way, English-subbed series can be retranslated into other languages. After translation is complete, the subtitles are written and timed. The text is typeset and checked for errors. The subtitles are encoded using VirtualDub or a similar program. There are several methods of subbing currently used. "Hard" subtitles, or hard subs, are encoded into the footage, and thus become hard to remove from the video without losing video quality (this can be done with a VirtualDub Filter). "Soft" subtitles, or soft subs, are subtitles applied at playback time from a subtitle datafile, either mixed directly into the video file, or in a separate file. With the correct media player or an auxiliary program softsubs are superimposed on the footage and appear indistinguishable from hardsubs.
Hard subs have traditionally been more popular than softsubs, due to a lack of player support and worries over plagiarism, but recently several major FanSub groups have begun using softsubs. Since modern video media can contain multiple softsubs, some groups release fansubs with several translations into different languages, or differently styled subtitles to fit different preferences. The internet allows for highly collaborative FanSubbing, and each member of a FanSub team may only complete one assigned task.
Online FanSubbing communities are able to release a fully subtitled episode (including increasingly elaborate karaoke with translation, kana & kanji for songs, additional remarks and translations of signs) in under 24 hours after an episode is debuted in Japan. Websites such as stormberry.tv allow the selectable soft subtitle tracks to be overlaid on web videos streamed from youtube. In the case of hard subtitles a video editor (commonly VirtualDub) uses an AVISynth script to load the raw video file and the subtitle file (created by the translators) then the video software applies the subtitles on the video and captures video with the subtitles "burned" in. The resulting FanSub is a computer video file.
In the case of soft subs, the companion sub data can be supplied as a separate file; however the complete package often now comes in a suitable media container such as Matroska. It can be copied to CD or DVD media for physical distribution, but is most often distributed using online file-sharing protocols such as viral video, BitTorrent and by file-sharing bots on IRC. This allows modern anime fans to download the finished product at no or low cost to themselves or to distributors.
[Some of the content in this article was provided by Wikipedia]
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