April 08, 2008
On a jet plane
Headed for California tomorrow. Brother's living in Berkeley with his fiancee, so I'm dropping in on them for a few days.
But before leaving, I managed to finish off the second volume of Lucky Star. Real marathon to process - two Shiraishi extras, and it's not like a 500-line LS episode is trivial even on a good day. Doing something a little experimental with it, though...
The client noted that a lot of the scenes seemed to have the characters totally obscured - either because overlapping subtitles came up into the main part of the screen, or because the scene had everything clustered right at the bottom and empty space everywhere else. Thus, when you're watching it subtitled, you can't really... see anything. This is always a possible downside, of course, but with Lucky Star, there's damn near always some sort of speech going on, and so they asked me, was there anything I could do about it?
So I'm trying to split overlapping dialogue up to the top of the screen, so that the subtitles for the TV in the background aren't obscuring everything. Also, when I hit one of those scenes where all the stuff to be seen is sitting right at the bottom, I yanked the subtitles into the empty space at the top.
Ordinarily I wouldn't do that. For one thing, it's a pain in the butt on my end to process. ;p Also, though, there's the problem of eye attention - if you're busy trying to find where the subtitle is on the screen, you're neither reading the subtitle nor enjoying the visuals, and it takes a bit for you to light on the correct spot... and with the speed of one of these episodes, you don't always have that much time to start with.
But the visual problem is real, too. In a show where a lot of the appeal is watching the cute moe characters and their reactions, not being able to see those reactions is a pretty big problem.
So what do people think? I hate to play games with the subtitle positioning - not when I'm not using a WYSIWYG system, and I don't have enough work to plunk down for a Wincaps box at this juncture. But it seems to be an improvement from a first watch here... and hell's bells, like there's someone else out there that's going to do it? I'd like to think that I'm the best at what I do, after all, even if that's a subjective topic. However, I'll be damned if there's anyone out there who's crazy enough to top me on this stuff...
But there will be no color-changing karaoke. Ever. EVER. At least, not with this DVD spec...
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But before leaving, I managed to finish off the second volume of Lucky Star. Real marathon to process - two Shiraishi extras, and it's not like a 500-line LS episode is trivial even on a good day. Doing something a little experimental with it, though...
The client noted that a lot of the scenes seemed to have the characters totally obscured - either because overlapping subtitles came up into the main part of the screen, or because the scene had everything clustered right at the bottom and empty space everywhere else. Thus, when you're watching it subtitled, you can't really... see anything. This is always a possible downside, of course, but with Lucky Star, there's damn near always some sort of speech going on, and so they asked me, was there anything I could do about it?
So I'm trying to split overlapping dialogue up to the top of the screen, so that the subtitles for the TV in the background aren't obscuring everything. Also, when I hit one of those scenes where all the stuff to be seen is sitting right at the bottom, I yanked the subtitles into the empty space at the top.
Ordinarily I wouldn't do that. For one thing, it's a pain in the butt on my end to process. ;p Also, though, there's the problem of eye attention - if you're busy trying to find where the subtitle is on the screen, you're neither reading the subtitle nor enjoying the visuals, and it takes a bit for you to light on the correct spot... and with the speed of one of these episodes, you don't always have that much time to start with.
But the visual problem is real, too. In a show where a lot of the appeal is watching the cute moe characters and their reactions, not being able to see those reactions is a pretty big problem.
So what do people think? I hate to play games with the subtitle positioning - not when I'm not using a WYSIWYG system, and I don't have enough work to plunk down for a Wincaps box at this juncture. But it seems to be an improvement from a first watch here... and hell's bells, like there's someone else out there that's going to do it? I'd like to think that I'm the best at what I do, after all, even if that's a subjective topic. However, I'll be damned if there's anyone out there who's crazy enough to top me on this stuff...
But there will be no color-changing karaoke. Ever. EVER. At least, not with this DVD spec...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at
09:13 PM
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Hey, you got three colors to work with. One for unsung foreground, one for sung foreground, and one for the outline. You're good to go!
When it comes to subtitling really complex shows (e.g. Excel Saga) there probably isn't any fully satisfactory solution. You just have to make your decision and go with it, and accept that someone will hate it no matter what you do.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 08, 2008 09:39 PM (+rSRq)
2
I'm well aware that it's technically possible. ;p
However, there's a total disconnect between "tools which can produce a karaoke effect" and "tools which can deal with professional timecode". You could make a set of DVD subtitles which had karaoke timing in it, but you can't make one that has timecodes associated with it - and if you use the tools to make timecode output, a process which is somewhat Rube Goldberg, the karaoke bits won't survive the transition.
You could theoretically take timed-but-not-timecode DVD subtitles and attempt to sync them up. But you'd better be your own DVD author, because any contract outfit is going to think that you're out of your mind (essentially correct).
If I had a program that could turn the WYSIWYG output of Aegisub into DVD subtitles, then take that navigation file and sync it to timecode, I'd pay handsomely. It would save me quite a bit of time per volume. (The first part exists, the second part is the kicker.) Regrettably, it's a very limited market... ;p
However, there's a total disconnect between "tools which can produce a karaoke effect" and "tools which can deal with professional timecode". You could make a set of DVD subtitles which had karaoke timing in it, but you can't make one that has timecodes associated with it - and if you use the tools to make timecode output, a process which is somewhat Rube Goldberg, the karaoke bits won't survive the transition.
You could theoretically take timed-but-not-timecode DVD subtitles and attempt to sync them up. But you'd better be your own DVD author, because any contract outfit is going to think that you're out of your mind (essentially correct).
If I had a program that could turn the WYSIWYG output of Aegisub into DVD subtitles, then take that navigation file and sync it to timecode, I'd pay handsomely. It would save me quite a bit of time per volume. (The first part exists, the second part is the kicker.) Regrettably, it's a very limited market... ;p
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 09, 2008 12:51 AM (LMDdY)
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