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 What It Feels Like to Sub

It's already been made clear that "fast and dirty" takes very little time at all to do, but it's sheer speed insures a fast relief to that "antsy to see what happens next" feeling. "Pop, Pop, Fizz, Fizz, Oh, what a relief it is!"

On a technical sub, the subber will often go over and over and over his timing to adjust it, and this extra work will take him a longer time to be able to make it available. Aaaah, comfort to watch!

The "creative" can be an emotional powerhouse..and is supperbly suited to the best quick and skillful switches of feelings created by some shoujo authors!

 

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Up the Pyramid TIMEWISE AND WORKWISE

The steps that create the "fast and dirty" as well as "technical" subs happen before the "creative" style can begin.

The "technical" looks a bit like the "fast and dirty" on its first run, before it's "cleaned up".

The "creative" will look a bit like the "fast and dirty" on a first run, then like the "technical" as it's cleaned up. Then once that's occured, the creative hell begins.

The hell is, in part, because it's not uncommon, when creativity is set lose, to cause all sorts of havoc with a subbing and other associated programs! There's a lot of starting back over at square 1 and testing new ideas again.

And, in addition, there's the testing of fonts, colors, and shapes...some of which will work and some which will fail. And there's the composition of info screens and other added graphics. For EVERY extra action, even the tiniest bit, will add up in QUANTITY to make a huge differences in the the subbers time.

For me...

Something similar to "fast and dirty"....23 minutes an episode, less that 2 hours for an entire volume.

Something like "technical" (at least for me. THIS DOES NOT COUNT THE TIME FOR TRANSLATIONS.)...1 week more or less for an entire volume. (Add more to that if the subber is part way to being creative by adding info screens or designing extra non-sub titles, logos, or using any unusual sub positions. For each and every unusual thing that's added, add more time.)

"Creative"...a solid month of early morning to late night work to complete an entire volume.

For an entire full length TV series like MB and FY. A year and a half of early morning to late night work every day.

Correcting Timing

An average 23 minute episode runs 300 - 500 timing events per episode (NOT Kodocha! It ISN'T average on lines (^_^))

Each episode must be correctly timed from where each line begins, that's 300 - 500 times, and also on the end of each of those 300-500 timing events. In other words, an beginning time and an ending time for event doubles the amount of timing that the subtitler has to check and correct per episode.

The first set of corrections are made and the episode is run with subtitles on a timing tape, so that the correction can be checked and more corrections can be made. It is a very long process of correcting, running the tape, correcting, running the tape, correcting, running the tape. Remember that an average TV series is going to have 4 episodes per tape! Technical or Creative subtitling is not for people who cannot concentrate or stay focused on a single task.

 CORRECTIONS

I do suffer from a poison induced neurotransmitter disorder that causes certain types of errors when writing, I'm usually able to catch most of them on my editing run-throughs, but not all. This is semi-individual to me.

However, there is a function of the brain that seems to be rather universal to humans in general and therefor to most all subtitlers. And I've found from programmers that they too suffer from this natural function of the brain.

The brain will shut down on what it's looking at once it's seen it thoroughly once or twice. The subber will only THINK that he's looking at the dialog word for word...but he's not! His brain has actually memorized what's supposed to be there!

The first we noticed of this phenomenon was that...

Over and over, Bruce, with his brilliant mind, could not catch his errors; I'd just walk by the room and glance at the screen and see one that he'd missed. He would do the same with my work. We could not catch obvious typos and errors that were right in front of us on our own work but could catch ANYONE else's.

But what really took the cake was the day that Colleen said as she looked at the screen "Read that line outloud. I read it. Colleen said "Mom, read that line one word at a time". I read it one word at a time. Colleen said "Read it one more time". I did because I really wanted to find out what she was telling me.

I had just spent all the time reading it off from memory and didn't actually read a WORD of it! Any yet, I read every single WORD even annunciating them for emphasis after the second time.

I had NO IDEA the brain could do that. After all, by the time the work was pre-mastered, there were 4 episodes done and 1200 - 20,000 timing events of dialog! I didn't even know I KNEW the line. I am so impressed by the sheer miracle of what even an impaired brain can do! Other subbers that we've talked to have claimed to have experienced the inability to SEE their errors...even ones right in front of their faces.

The point is is that if a subber becomes blinded by the redundancy of their own work, they need others to go over the work. We preferred to keep our work nearby for a number of reasons. For a while we didn't have anyone to do it. Later daughter Colleen did some, Daughter-in-law, Heidi has done some very recently for me but not Bruce's work.

Picking Proofers Needs To Be Done By Testing

Intelligence not a deciding factor for a good proofer on it's own. Why? Because there are people who's minds will automatically compensate for what should be on the screen. In watching people watch these works in the pre-master stage, I saw intelligent people compensate and other who's minds won't compensate for much of anything!

It's wise to have more that one proofer who is not watching the work at the same time. It's odd but it would appear that what one mind is attuned to finding error-wise another is not. Colleen is a good proofer, but she will miss some things. Heidi is one of the best proofers I've ever seen...something like a hound dog with her nose to the ground on the hunt. But even Heidi can miss things occasionally.

It's always best to have proofer who haven't seen the work in advance.

 In conclusion, though we are not fansubbers anymore in the true sense, it's felt that having a bird's eye view of what many of your anime fansubbers are going through will help give you a better perspective of the sacrifices they are making for other people.

Even feeling the way that I do, regarding not doing any more fansubbing unless by permission from the mother companies, I have said that I would be supportive of my fellow fansubbers.

The first thing on the agenda is to help put others in their shoes. Because without someone telling the story, the public could start guessing. And unfortunately, when guesses are made, it's usually less kindly thoughts than the actual truth.

When I think of anime in the US and where it would be now if it had not been for the love that made people use their own money to do it, I feel a great deal of pleasure and regret for oh so many reasons.

Changing Subjects now....Next....Your Art

HOME PAGE General Site Directory

 The Original Marmalade Boy Guide

The 1999 Additional Directories

 The 2002 Directories Vintage Tomodachi-A Partial History of Anime

Add "KarenDuffy" before @ispwest.com to email