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Answerman - The Changing Tides

I'm always surprised at how many people watch fansubs when I go on Tumblr to look up stuff about shows. A lot of the screencaps people post are from fansubs. It's sad.

The (sometimes ridiculous) karaoke effects that fansubs have are not really possible with streaming video, where most subtitles are added to the video by the Flash-based software that's run on the user's computer.

LavenderMintRose wrote:

I'm always surprised at how many people watch fansubs when I go on Tumblr to look up stuff about shows. A lot of the screencaps people post are from fansubs. It's sad.

They might do that because it's easier to take screenshots with 'em. With a video file, you just need to hit a quick key command and then boom! With a legal streaming site, you'd have to hit Print Screen, paste it into something, and then crop the image.

I don't think this is entirely correct. I don't know the details of how Crunchyroll's flash player works but I have a sneaking suspicion they use Aegisub to design and time their subs (I've seen a number of their shows, especially some of the earlier ones, that use the Aegisub default font settings) , which is the same program fansubbers use for their fancy subs. If the player is designed to use these subtitle files the same way media players do I don't see why they couldn't have fancy karaoke subs if they wanted to.

I'm always surprised at how many people watch fansubs when I go on Tumblr to look up stuff about shows. A lot of the screencaps people post are from fansubs. It's sad.

About translating songs - they translate the songs in Love Live! (probably not much of a rights issue because the songs are pretty much part of the show), and they use pink subtitles on them. That makes me so happy ;

I think they should remake Code Geass, but with more Suzaku fanservice. The part where he and Kallen are on the island naked? Make that whole fishing thing look like Free. ... honestly, a ton of Suzaku and "Julius" fanservice is the only way to save that Akito series at this point. It's boring and completely devoid of everything that made the original series great. Too much angst.

I don't get why people continue to use those shitty streaming sites. If your gonna do something illegal, at least do it right.

This is a combination of annoyance and inane copyright law. But not usually laziness on the translator’s part. I can use my translations of Fairy Tail and Tegami Bachi and Shugo Chara as an example. Let me state first that I translate the songs for all those shows immediately. But the lyrics to the music are controlled by a different company than the licensor in almost all cases, therefore the translation needs to be approved by the music company before it can be included. That is the big problem. Under Japanese law the lyricist always retains rights to any translation of his/her lyrics, therefore it can easily take weeks and weeks for song translations to be approved because Japanese music companies move SLOW.
I finally got translations for the fairy tail opening and ending approved and retroactively added them into my subtitles for all previous episodes around episode 8, and then 4 episodes later they went and changed both the opening and ending. I’ve already translated them and submitted them for approval, but it’ll probably be another 10 weeks until they come back. Tegami Bachi’s songs are even more difficult because of the high profile artists involved. The singer wrote the lyrics to the opening himself and so theoretically he would have had to personally approve the translation… I suppose that’s why my translation still hasn’t been approved, even though there’s already a NEW opening and ending.
Shugo Chara is considerably easier, because the groups that sing the songs are owned completely by the investors of the show (both Buono! Shugo Chara Egg! and the Guardian 4! all were created specifically for Shugo Chara), therefore approvals are able to be done far more smoothly. For most translators and translation companies, they don’t even bother to submit translations because it gives more work to the Japanese, and is a bit “annoying” to the licensors. I go the extra mile to translate them promptly, but it’s really the hard work of the people at Medianet (TV Tokyo) in tracking down the rights holders and getting approvals that at least some of the shows I translate have translated lyrics.

the last point oh so reminds me of gatchaman crows, where the fansub lyrics were completely made up because of the high amount of engrish.

I don't think this is entirely correct. I don't know the details of how Crunchyroll's flash player works but I have a sneaking suspicion they use Aegisub to design and time their subs (I've seen a number of their shows, especially some of the earlier ones, that use the Aegisub default font settings) , which is the same program fansubbers use for their fancy subs. If the player is designed to use these subtitle files the same way media players do I don't see why they couldn't have fancy karaoke subs if they wanted to.

It's worse than that. For example, on FUNi's site you can't really take a screen shot by pausing the video because it has an overlay when you pause it. So it becomes incredibly difficult especially since seeking video on a stream is sometimes very difficult to do, now it's nearly impossible with two barriers, if you are looking for a specific frame.