Turned in Lucky Star vol. 4 subtitles. Whew! That was one hell of a formatting run...

Just for the interested, generating volume 4 involved creating almost 4,200 .tif images, 20 MB compressed, 1.69 GB uncompressed. (Ah, uncompressed .tifs...) Of the two Minoru Shiraishi extras, one of them came in at a measly 400 or so finished subtitles, whereas the other one was a much more robust 500 subtitles. That's for less than 15 minutes of video, folks. An "average" episode of Lucky Star, after all the overlapping is taken into account, is between 550 and 650.

The reason why? Tons of little captions that pop up. You see more and more of this kind of stuff in Japanese productions... maybe they're getting influenced by Nico Nico Douga? But when you're subtitling, every time one of them comes up or goes down, that's another subtitle picture (and they tend to come up and go down with total disregard to the audio that's under them... or worse, they just say what's in the audio but are timed differently!)

Unfortunately, you can't just ignore them. Seeing text flash up on the screen in a language you can't read, and then NOT having that text translated, is pretty distracting. You can't just ask the viewer to assume that you're only dealing with the "relevant" or "interesting" text. (It's a little different in the body of a show, when you have background captions like menus or random store fronts that you can ignore freely.)

When I was working at ADV, I had a little utility that could take two subtitle tracks and fuse them into a single track, combining the subtitle images into a new image stream and producing a new navigation file. I'd give... well, not any part of my actual anatomy, but it'd be worth some considerable cash for me to lay hands on something like that again...

Saimoe's been off and on through the first half of the first round. Nanoha survived an assassination attempt (at the hands of a True Tears character, I kid you not) by a margin of twenty votes, along with two or three hundred fake votes (first time this year that that's been significant...) Maria lost to Rena with each breaking 1000 votes, but other than that day, vote totals haven't come anywhere close to that, and there's even an example of a round being won with a winner under 400 votes (admittedly, when the competition is a Gundam 00 character and a cat, it's not hard to see why people didn't bother...)

Upcoming rounds of interest include Rei tomorrow, Ranka vs. Mayu vs. Kokoro the day after, and Karen from Geass versus Nagisa from Clannad -and- Kanata from LS. Hey, happy thought, I still haven't reached the Kanata episode... Most of the "big" matches from the first round are behind us, so it's going to be a couple weeks before the also-rans are cleared from the table. Ah well...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:26 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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