I was just wondering. Does ANBU have a contact in Japan that uses an All In Wonder ATI card to record a raw Naruto episode, splice out the commercials, sub it and seed it on bittorrent?
Who pays for maintaining the site?
Where is the site hosted? Did the people who start the site rent space on commercial ISPs or did they buy servers themselves?
Who seeds the torrents? Are they seeded off of several cable connections, or on a server with a T1 link?
This has been brought up several times, go to the fansubbing section.
Indeed, I'm moving this thread.
I guess once again I'll give an overview of this whole process, and then get to the specifics...
How fansubbing works (the intro guide. This is what ANBU and AnimeOne do)
Step 1: (Raw Capture) the show airs on TV in japan. People with some skills and appropriate hardware capture the video stream, do some basic cleanup (deinterlacing, etc) and encode it as a high quality divx5 or xvid video and usually mp3 audio, make sure they synch, and share them various places (winny, for one). The file the vidcapper produces is a "raw" -- unsubtitled video, waiting to be worked on. The capper is generally not part of the group, though some groups do have their own dedicated rawcappers.
Step 2: (Raw Acquisition) the fansub group (aone and anbu in this case) has some people called raw hunters who find the raws on the various places they're shared, and send them to a dump, which lets the other staff members get them reasonably quickly.
Step 3: (Translation) the translator gets the raw, and goes through and watches it, writing down translations for what everyone says.
Step 4: (Editing) someone goes through and cleans up and makes sense of what the translator wrote down, making sure it has somewhat proper english and ok spelling and other such stuff, and also making sure it's consistent with previous episodes and with itself.
Step 5: (Timing) the timer synchs up the edited text to the audio on the episode, and makes sure that the timing of the subs follows some basic rules (scene timing, sub flashing, minimum duration, etc).
Step 6: (Typesetting) the typesetter applies the normal series styles to the episode -- so for example "on screen spoken text" "off screen spoken text" "unspoken/internal", does this for every line by comparing each line with the episode itself and seeing what's going on. The typesetter also makes signs for on-screen japanese text (given translations for that text). This produces what is (hopefully) a final script.
Step 7: (Encoding) the encoder takes the script and the raw and encodes them, applying filters to clean up the video and make it somewhat consistent with color values for previous episodes, among other things. The encoder controls the size and bitrate, and usually has a huge bag of tricks to use to make things look pretty and compress well.
Step 8: (Quality Control) the qc team gets the encoder's episode (usually from a dump he uploads it to) and looks for errors in any of the previous steps -- editing errors, typeset problems, encode issues, timing issues, and if they have the skills translation problems. Usually QC is more of a team effort than the other phases, with multiple people checking for errors. QC then gets those errors to people who have the skills to fix them, the script gets fixed, the encoder gets a fresh copy of it, and encode/qc cycles around again.
Step 9: (Distro and Release) once an episode emerges from QC, it's ready to be released. It's probably already on a dump from the encoder's upload, so distro gets it from that dump and distributes it internally, then the distro managers make a torrent and makes sure it's seeded, the xdcc people get it to the bots, and release happens.
Note that editing can be before or after timing, and before or after typesetting. Often multiple editing passes are done, and more stuff is cleaned up each time. QC/fixing and encoding iterate until everyone's happy (or just sick of it, whichever comes first). Stuff can be done out of order, and sometimes the scope of jobs overlaps... but that's a basic idea of how it works.
Every fansub team works differently, even within the same group different teams have different procedures. Sometimes QC occurs with a script before the encode. Sometimes a translator will go back over another translator's work to make sure everything makes sense and to make sure meanings were preserved through the editing process. This can also be iterative, with translators and editors and translation checkers contributing different interpretations until the best way of phrasing something is found. But generally the process is basically the same throughout the community.
To answer the questions specifically that were asked:
ANBU doesn't have a specific person they use as a raw capper, neither does AonE. We acquire raws based on the availability of them on peer to peer sharing programs. The raw cappers tend to remove the commercials and share stuff, but not usually on bittorrent. It is ANBU and AnimeOne who actually make the subs and do the quality control stuff and the final encode, the raw capture (the guy who lives in japan) is just the first step.
Gotwoot is not directly affiliated with ANBU or AnimeOne, however its owner is directly affiliated with animeone (because ciber's cool like that, we love ya bud [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gif[/img]). Ciber is the owner of gotwoot and he pays the bills, we don't ask him too many questions about it. Gotwoot is hosted on a dedicated server (I think 2 dedicated servers now) in some colo datacenter, but I forget which one offhand. Each dedicated server for gotwoot is on a 100 mbit network. The bittorrent seeders are people with fast connections in general, ranging from fast cable speeds (80K/sec or better) to people with 100 mbit edu links. It takes all kinds.
Wow, a lot goes into fansubbing. How would one try to become part of the team? If at all possible, I would love to be a QC'er. That sounds like fun, until I've seen the same episode about 10 times [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif[/img]
Thanks for all that info complich8!
mainva | aptigo | JTD out
watch a raw episode, then watch a fansubbed episode , that will give you a idea [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]
That's funny in a way. But I'd rather not. I want to help AonE! The only thing I can help then with is seeding (up to about 30KB/sec) and quality checking....
mainva | aptigo | JTD out
[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-cool.gif[/img]
When i checked out the Tenge raw that came out i think a day or two ago, i saw how much work they put into each episode.
A whole op song needed to be translated, the size was huge 330mb and so on.
bigger raws are so much easier to work with, for the encoder anyway.
Typically bigger raws have less artifacting and just generally look better (though it still depends on the original signal, the capper's settings, and the quality of the cappers hardware). What's really a pain is when you have to work with a 120-150 meg raw for a somewhat high action series. That's a HUGE bitch.
Op/Ed song translations aren't easy, but they're not insanely hard either.
ain't that the truth...especially if the song is a rap/hiphop... those are a biatch for anyone that is involved in the process...
I was wondering why some episodes are 200+MB and some are 140+ MB instead of what most episodes are, around 175 MB?
I was thinking about this because when I burn it onto CDs the 200+MB eps make it so only 3 eps fit onto a CD.
Is it because A&A decided that they were good episodes that needed high quality? Or maybe unsure whether to make all eps 233 MB in future and made one but went back to 175MB?
Also, a few episodes were encoded in xvid and some divx. Was this another uncertainty of what format to use?
Does anyone know a player that can play xvid like divx player plays divx?
I have a slow computer and xvid and divx 5 lags in media player classic. However, divx player has some method of playing divx files so that it is less likely to lag. Does it use hardware acceleration (I have GEforece2), or just skip more frames? Well this is a little off topic now...
About raws, they would be better actually raw instead of divx or xvid first. But it would take longer to download, and the fansubs are high quality anyway so whatever you're doing is good.
Exactly minako, like on the tenjo tenge op that ive refered to. Its a mix of rap/hip hop. I listened to it the first time, and had to slow it down just to see what they were saying.ain't that the truth...especially if the song is a rap/hiphop... those are a biatch for anyone that is involved in the process...
I can't imagine a translator having to slow it down part by part to see whats going on.
Kawarime, if your on a slower comp, try zoomplayer:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download413.html
Heheh, about Quality Checker, it is definately harder than you think, If you are really interested ask for the test from AnimeOne, you'll be suprised what you have to do, maybe.
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