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NEWS: Nozomi Licenses Rental Magica TV Anime

configspace wrote:

Zalis116 wrote: But as others have mentioned, buying a DVD gives money back to the studios and creators. common assumption but.. this is not true.. at all.

Really? I'd like to see this explained.

Production cost cutbacks
A 30-minute TV animation production generally costs nearly 10 million yen, although there are cases in which production companies have received only around five million yen. Most TV animations run a loss that the production companies attempt to overcome through secondary uses of content, such as sales of videos, DVDs and character products.

The general rule in the past was that TV anime or movies that enjoyed a certain degree of popularity in Japan would be offered overseas, but titles produced recently have increasingly borne overseas markets in mind from the outset.

Also, if you tape something like Lost or 24 off TV, do you demand that they create a version in another language in order to give you "something substantial" before you'll buy it on DVD?

Now as far as the usage of notes goes. I am firmly an advocate of brief on screen notes. Most of the notes are there because it's impossible to incorporate them into the translation. I'd rather have something that briefly explains the point in context rather watch the entire episode in ignorance then go back and forth and rewatch parts while reading some offline booklet and try to recall the scene. The official TLer for the R1 Excel Saga must've thought the same too.
(And any lengthy explanation can simply use a note that references the full explanation elsewhere. Some fansubs provide such explanations in offline/website notes or at the end of the episode)

And it even includes a nice graph on how an anime gets made (I'd say our R1 distributors have moved from at the end of the process to Step 1:planning in that toy companies are brought in at that stage for licensing/funding)

Itd be... insanely awesome (but not realistic for another 5-10 years at least) if the industry could figure out copy protection is a gigantic failure and would just give me that up front on the disc.

While buying legal releases of shows may not directly support the creators, I like to think that good sales figures improve the chances that the creators will be hired to work on new projects. In the same vein, renting anime DVDs doesn't put money in the R1 distributors' pockets, but presumably keeps the rental services buying new R1 releases.

As for TL notes in official releases, I still say that ADV had it right back when it released Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. An optional subtitle track with TL notes for folks who want the additional information seems like a win/win situation to me, and I'd like to think it wouldn't draw too many additional man hours to implement.

I left out the theft/piracy concerns from my previous post, as those can be argued until long after the cows come home. But as others have mentioned, buying a DVD gives money back to the studios and creators. Watching a fansub does not. Also, if you tape something like Lost or 24 off TV, do you demand that they create a version in another language in order to give you "something substantial" before you'll buy it on DVD?

Legibility: Take Aria the Animation, another sub-only Nozomi release. Nozomi's subs are in the standard yellow and white styles. Easily readable, all the time. On the other hand, the fansub release, which is pretty good overall, decided it would be wise to "fit" the anime by using blue subtitles...in a series overflowing with sky and water scenery! Yeah, quite a few fansubs are legible. But the many that aren't leave me longing for good-ol DVD-yellow, or at least older fansub styles from the time before the "it's softsubbed, so you can take a bunch of tedious steps to change the styles!" cop-out existed.

Yes, I'm aware that many shows these days are being aired in crappy station upscales and re-filtered by fansub encoders to make presentable 1280x720 releases. (Along with a choice few actually created and aired in true HD.) Even at the fansub level, HDTV releases have been supplanted by DVD-rip versions for some shows like Myself; Yourself and Secret of Haruka Nogizaka.

My point was, for Rental Magica, there are no HD fansubs. So DVDs do represent better A/V quality. Especially audio, as ac3 is better than the lossy codecs like mp3/vorbis/aac that you'd get in the fansubs. And they're not asking you to shell out 20-30 bucks for 3-6 episodes, they're asking you to shell out 35-50 bucks for 12 episodes. On a per episode basis, you're looking at a difference of $3.33 - $10 per episode vs. $2.92 - $4.17.

Maybe the "reverse importation" concerns by Japan should point out to them the fact that they are charging too much for their product.

poehitman wrote:

Maybe the "reverse importation" concerns by Japan should point out to them the fact that they are charging too much for their product.

The fact that the best selling anime DVD in Japan right now is priced at 2100 yen for what amounts to five minutes of actual footage speaks to that as well.