How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers • Hacker News Board

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#51

Post by __z » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

towelguy wrote: post #46

jzelinskie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fansubs are almost always better than the commercial releases, because if the show is even relatively popular (and shows that get official releases usually are), a group will edit the official release's script. You honestly can't beat the time and passion fans will put in. Most of translators working for places like CrunchyRoll get paid per release, so they have no incentive to spend more time on a release and give i…

One problem with commercial releases is overlocalization. Watchers too have background knowledge (Japan mythology or food for example) and sometimes there's a dissonance in what you hear and what they mean. Pokemon calling rice balls donuts[0] comes to mind. [0] http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Rice_ball

Overlocalization (and censorship) happened much more in the much earlier days of English anime (like the time when Pokemon came out). There isn't a real lot of that now because the fanbase wants true to the original translations. I have been out of the anime loop for a while now but that is my understanding. The NA release of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind comes to mind - it was released as Warriors of the Wind and was a total bastardization of the story. Miyazaki was incredibly dissatisfied with it so he adopted a "no cuts" policy for any future translations of his work. Apparently (so the rumor goes) when the English release of Princess Mononoke was being worked on they requested permission to change it in some way. The response from Studio Ghibli was a package containing a katana with the message "No cuts".

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#52

Post by __z » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

mxfh wrote: post #39

VeejayRampay wrote: post #3

French japanimation enthusiasts over 30 probably remember how official dubbers for Fist of the North Star/Hokuto No Ken in the late 80's actually took pride in providing bogus dubbing (with bad puns, changes in the dialog and purposely egregious voice-overs) because they thought "the show should not have been brought to young French kids" and just didn't care [1] This is precisely why you need enthusiasts providing q…

This kind of dubbing wasn't exclusive to anime in that era, publishers basically bought the rights to cheap visual content and produced their own stories and scripts on top of it for maximum impact in their respective local markets. Germany: Die Zwei / The Pesuaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persuaders!#Redubbed_versi... Most famous and polarizing was probably the reworking of three different original program…

Also - Mighty Morphin Power Rangers!

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#53

Post by kuboa » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 6:18 PM UTC

griffinmb wrote: post #37

thrillgore wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree that a lot of english dubs are bad, but I consider Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex, not Arise) to be the two exceptions. The casting decisions were very well made.

I would add Fullmetal Alchemist and Death Note to the list of well-dubbed content!

I'm hearing Baccano! dub is even better than the original, though I haven't gotten around to that one yet myself.

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#54

Post by __z » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #2

Piracy has never been about cost as much as it has been about convenience. For a long time the fansubbers simply offered a better product; shows from now rather than five years ago, with better-quality translations, and often better-quality video. Fans wanted to support the industry - I know more than one person with a shelf full of official English DVDs, still in their shrinkwrap - but the quality wasn't there. Even…

The fansubbing community way back in the day (which is what this article is talking about) was never about convenience, it was about being able to watch anime that wasn't otherwise available. It was the only way. It was actually quite inconvenient. We are talking about the day of trading grainy 3rd-5th generation VHS tapes through snail-mail. Before P2P downloading. Before widespread access to high-speed internet - that's what we are talking about here.

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#55

Post by james-skemp » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 6:33 PM UTC

kriro wrote: post #13

"""piracy is really a last resort for when they really love the content but can’t get it any other way.""" This is very true and a pretty strong indicator that you are leaving money on the table by ignoring a customer segment. I've reduced my media consumption a ton but know enough people who stream TV shows (technically not illegal) they'd gladly pay for. The problem: they want to watch them in the original language…

I've always been told that it's usually for legal reasons/costs that they'll leave this money on the table. I believe it was in the context of Miami Vice that I saw this came up, specifically in regards to music licensing (for DVD release many years ago).

Does anyone know if contracts have gotten any better with regards to streaming purposes? With Hulu's raise I assume there's now some language being put into these to account for it.

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#56

Post by james-skemp » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 6:35 PM UTC

kuboa wrote: post #53

griffinmb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add Fullmetal Alchemist and Death Note to the list of well-dubbed content!

I'm hearing Baccano! dub is even better than the original, though I haven't gotten around to that one yet myself.

I think I went back to the Japanese, but I've heard this as well, and found the episodes I did watch to be quite enjoyable.

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#57

Post by hfsktr » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 6:37 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #41

aaggarwal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree some of english dubbing in anime is very poor. I normally watch subbed versions of anime. Though, I like the orignal English dubbing and music (Funimation version) of DragonBall Z more than the Japanese version :)

I highly recommend Dragon Ball Z Abridged[1] to anyone who has watched the original. Comedy gold. 1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6EC7B047181AD013

I didn't realize they put the playlist on youtube. Strange that it appears to be one episode behind.

http://teamfourstar.com/

You are right though. It's hilarious and somehow still follows the plot pretty well.

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#58

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

cjslep wrote: post #15

I enjoy watching various anime but am by no means into Japanese culture, nor the American culture that is into Japanese culture. However, when I was first introduced to anime by a friend (minus Spirited Away) which was Naruto, I was introduced to the English-subbed versions even though English dubs were available. After watching a few episodes of listening to Japanese and reading the subs, I thought it would be a goo…

> So, that is how my teenage self wound up pirating a lot of anime: because the fansubbing was extremely good and I could pick up on Japanese vocal intonation. I could actually tell what was a joke, and what was anger, instead of wondering when someone would have feelings at all in their English monotone!

This seem to hold for classic cinema and television as well, which is why I avoid dubbing like the plague. Not only people who get paid for the job can't get translations right (which is a problem with subtitles as well, but at least if you know even a little of the language of the movie, you have a secondary reference to sort out translation errors on the fly), they often also can't convey the emotions, so you get a severely degraded experience.

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#59

Post by kevingadd » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 6:47 PM UTC

kelbesque wrote: post #50

kevingadd wrote: post #30

I have paid subscriptions to the legal streaming services and own a handful of the anime series I watch on DVD/Bluray. I still almost always download releases off of websites - some of which are actually just the legal streaming release repackaged into a form you can watch offline. I'd be happy if the services I paid for gave me a reason not to hit the shady fansub services. Why? * There are specific fansubbing group…

I'm not always the most attentive viewer, could you give me an example of the colorspace problem? I'm really interested to see the issue side-by-side.

Video is typically transmitted in one of two colorspaces. The terminology here is tricky and hard for me to remember, but I think it's 'studio levels' and 'computer levels'?

Anyway, all you really need to know is that there are two main standards for the range of values in each RGB color channel. IIRC, they are 0-255 and 16-235. So if you're using the broadcast standard (16-235), values below 16 or above 235 don't exist, and 16 is black. But a 24bpp/32bpp surface on a computer can store the full range of values no matter what, so there are various scenarios where graphics code needs to know what to do with those values. Discard them? Saturate up/down? Rescale everything so that the whole buffer is 16-235?

It gets trickier when interacting with other hardware. Your TV might expect 16-235 values, in which case your video card and/or software need to rescale 0-255 values down to 16-235 so they look correct on your TV. Your game console might be putting out 16-235 because it assumes you have a bad TV, and when you run that console through an HDMI capture device, it might be doing a 16-235 -> 0-255 rescale behind your back to 'fix' your video. Then when you fix your console settings to output 0-255, your capture device is still doing the rescale, and you're saturating values below 16 or above 235.

It's a mess.

If you search 'rgb studio levels' on Google you can find some people talking about it, like this: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/975618

It's a common source of confusion when dealing with video, and if you're unlucky, multiple stages in a display pipeline will each mishandle levels, scaling them to a range that's too small or truncating values, etc.

Re: How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

#60

Post by Nadya » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 6:51 PM UTC

cjslep wrote: post #15

I enjoy watching various anime but am by no means into Japanese culture, nor the American culture that is into Japanese culture. However, when I was first introduced to anime by a friend (minus Spirited Away) which was Naruto, I was introduced to the English-subbed versions even though English dubs were available. After watching a few episodes of listening to Japanese and reading the subs, I thought it would be a goo…

>That was a horrible experience. The English dubbed voices seemed to lack passion or say things in the wrong tones (or just be monotone!).

What did you do. You killed my friend. I'll have you pay for that. Rrrraaaarrrgggh. I'm so angry.

(Note the lack of exclamations or question marks.)