| Written by Kyle Barghout, on 13-02-2008 17:53 |
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You may not know, but FanSubbing dates back as far as the 1980's, and was originally made onto VHS media format. With technology constantly changed, how have FunSubs evolved along with it?
The Evolution of FanSubs
FanSubs originated during the explosion of anime production during the 1980s in Japan. Very few titles were licensed for distribution in foreign countries. This made it very difficult for anime fans abroad to have access to new anime titles. Some fans with knowledge of the Japanese language began producing amateur subtitled copies of the new anime programs so that they could share them with the fans all over the globe who did not speak Japanese.
FanSubs were originally distributed in the media form of VHS’s. These were usually very low quality, time consuming in their development, expensive to produce, (Over US$4000 in 1986) and very difficult get your hands on. A limited number of copies were made and then mailed out or distributed at local anime clubs. Fans could purchase fansubs at a modest cost or could contact clubs who would record the material on their own blank video cassettes.
However, these days, thanks to the widespread access to high-speed internet, desktop video editing and DVD ripping, he original development process has more-or-less been completely abandoned in favour of digital FanSubbing, which can also be known as DigiSubbing, and is now electronically distributed via the internet.
This means that FanSubbing has transformed from a slow and tedious task, with poor video and audio output, into a cheap, easy and quick way to create high quality and highly available alternative to their official DVD’s, of which most are only slightly better than their pirated counterpart. However, with technology constantly on the move, some FanSubs are now being released in HD quality.
However, most FanSubs are encoded at less than DVD quality, and often feature fewer channels of sound and less picture quality due to many of them stemming originally from TV recordings. Even FanSubs based on Japanese DVD rips have less quality, primarily due to file size: 175 MB, 233 MB, and 350 MB are generally treated as the "standard" sizes for a FanSub file because they divide evenly into 700 MB, the size of a typical CD-R. Since the introduction of DVD’s, sizes like 172 MB and 344 MB are also used, allowing 13 or 26 episodes (one season) to fit on a single DVD.
However, since most DigiSubs now use a better MPEG-4 compression, in comparison to the MPEG-2 compression used by DVDs, the difference in quality is becoming less noticeable despite the smaller file sizes. DigiSubs are now of such quality and accessibility that the incentive to upgrade to a legitimate copy may be severely diminished. However, recent research by the Yale Economic Review has provided evidence that suggests that people who download movies are no less likely to buy movies than those who do not, calling this conclusion into serious question. Economic instabilities in both the US and Japan have made it hard to gauge the precise consequences of DigiSubs on the commercial industry, as well.
In most countries, the ethical implications of producing, distributing, or watching fansubs are topics of much controversy.
[Some of the content in this article was provided by Wikipedia]
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