The other issue was this was pre-internet, though there WERE fans on GENIE, and some message boards. This made sourcing scripts (and help) very dificult, and also tended to set what you COULD and COULDN'T work on. Sometimes, you bought a disc, cause you HAD a script. Sometimes you did a show, because someone had a a disc and script (the "Dragon Knight" factor). I wrote the scripts on some pretty well known 80s works. But The biggest chunk was 22 episodes of Maison Ikkoku (AND the final movie). MI will make you work, everything has to mean 3 different things to 3 different people (and this was when no one knew what "Sempai" meant. Our systems were quite puny. I ran on an Amiga 1000 with 1.5 megs of memory (I brought that up with a panel of old-timers, they were shocked I had that much, the audience by how little that was). Linier editing of scripts was a pain, but the true hell was doing an AMV "mosiac- style" linearly with a VCR with flying erase head. Who knows, a few of my works may be floating around in old collections (I have pro credits that cycle into print once in a while.. I don't feel forgotten). Maybe somebody stole one my riffs (like ADV did when they used the MZ 23 gag for their Dirty Pair OVA scratch track..
Right! When I first started looking into this I was really impressed by the creativity and technical skills of people back then. Crazy to think how much the industry has changed in 25 years.
Oh man... I recall a guy here in Brazil who used to do that with his anime VHS collection he brought directly from Japan. Laser Disc was pretty much unknown and rare here in Brazil, but VHS fan subbing directly at lower quality did the job for anime that wasn't available on the TV or at VHS rental stores. He had his own video contraption to place subtitles in a timely fashion and it was pretty similar... Tho... It was a wiring mess that I didn't knew how it worked, but the guy was an electronics wizard who also just happened to know Japanese and wanted to watch anime together with folks who didn't knew japanese. lol
Brasil teve sua própria história no fansub haha. Eu era criança nesses anos 90. Tava longe de conhecer anime. Mas conheci um pouco da história lendo revistas como animax e entendendo a dificuldade que era traduzir, vender as fitas e mandar por correio
It's incredible that people found ways to do this with analog media and methods. I can't imagine they made tons of money, they probably just wanted to share something they loved with friends and fans who were interested but couldn't understand Japanese. I wonder if this is how some of the folks at early US distributors like ADV and Animeigo got their start. Thanks for taking the time to make this- it's an important and poorly understood part of anime history.
AnimEigo definitely did, they had a extremely primitive setup of a type A tape deck connected to a macintosh Plus which then was connected to a D2 deck The Mac plus program had to be extremely optimized to allow for the correct timing AnimEigo has a great writeup on their history on their site
It really is crazy the jank people had to deal with and the work they had to put in back then, but I think thats part of what made it worth doing for alot of people. and it's awesome to see people other than myself still being interested in this stuff. Thanks for the comment! n to quote one of the guys who commented on my post in r/laserdisc. "We used to do this kind of stuff in our anime fan group here on the Texas Gulf coast back in the mid-90s. I personally used an Amiga with a video genlock and a Usenet account to produce handmade subtitles for Cleopatra DC, la blue girl, and a few other edge titles. Was minorly involved with AD Vision video at the time of their inception through our local anime club."
As an "oldtaku" who started watching anime back in the early 90's, I'm eternally grateful to the dedicated fans, who went to such great lengths to give us the chance to watch series we might not be able to otherwise.
That's awesome! When I first started looking into this it blew my mind. lol I checked back on the analytics n apparently the algorithm gods are blessing this video, at least by my standards xD
That's not least mentioning the need to understand Japanese _and_ good storytelling in the first place so as to translate the dialogue not only coherently but also appropriately to the scenario. In my short time of rudimentary fansubbing that's not an easy task yet the fact that the ancient masters not only dealt with it but also all the technical difficulties mentioned above is... awe inspiring, I guess.
i still have some fan sub tapes from when i was a kid! Love going back and watching their creative input cause there was no standardized subbing criteria yet :D
Burn Up is a lot of fun. Been on an OVA binge lately. After messing around with sub tracks in Resolve, it's cool to see the actual hardware for old school hard encoding.
I fell down a similar rabbit hole. I collected retro computers and also got into laserdiscs. I realized I had in fact all the equipment needed to reproduce the fansubbed VHS tapes I had watched when I was a teenager. With a Genlock and some original amiga software used for fansubbing that is still available I am able to watch my laserdiscs with live subs on my old tube TVs because that seems like a pretty millennial-boomer thing to do.
haha I'm glad you liked it! In my defense, I only post a few times a year and some of it is random stuff I'm playing around with. xD Heres a playlist of video's I made which I actually put a fair bit of effort into if you'd like to watch more! Cheers! th-cam.com/play/PL8uBMFaUa1L6MGvzdtsDfVi96kG5Qj0Dh.html
When I was active there were already bots with download quene of newest on-air animes in Japan. I download the stuff and get translation scripts or ask ppl to translate stuff. Then I just use a the „tv out“ of the Grafikcard to record it on VHS tapes. Yeah was a good time some friends hang around at my first flat and all were into movies and or anime so we had full movies in .rm (real media or something.) it was like stamp size of movies fresh from USA and we copy them to vhs in Germany. Many horror movies we did from laserdisc to vhs becouse they were uncut ( we had strong laws in Germany for violence in movies ) well it was a great time and many people connect over me. But then the most absurd thing happened.. I got a girlfriend !
Thats awesome! :) judging by your channel name the passion for horror lives on. Shame most adventures end with a girlfriend haha Im sure if I had one i wouldn't be allowed to spend so much money on dumb crap lol
Excellent information, the 90s straight to VHS anime was my favorite growing up. I just found myself going through some old favorites. :D Also, 1000th subscriber 🎉
Thanks for the comment! I've always been into AV stuff but only got into anime in 2014, so I was pretty stoked to go down this rabbit hole. xD Kirino best girl.
@@The_Smuggler_ ooh yes id watch that! ive got my own collection of oreimo scales, ive got a few of the 1/7 and 1/8 Kirino and Ruri ones, but I never got the 2.5 one
Links below! N Dont forget to RING A DING THAT SUBSCRIBE BELL! Edit: This video is doing really well compared to anything else I've made, thank you everyone for taking the time to watch. I hope you enjoy it! William Chows Recommended Videos: Differences between a digital fansub and an analog fansub: th-cam.com/video/shtrn3QGcDk/w-d-xo.html A real example of how to fansub Red Riding Hood Cha Cha using analog fansubs: th-cam.com/video/wKIYu7ZX6uU/w-d-xo.html A real time example of building an AMV using a laser disc and a flying erase head SVHS deck. th-cam.com/video/mcXFvEjP5cI/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/f8DsSflzoCI/w-d-xo.html Some of the tech used at Arctic Animation back in the day: th-cam.com/video/-RBaeFxJMqE/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/arvl_DKJpmA/w-d-xo.html
Wellllll, you're in the ballpark, but the details are a bit off. I was a fansubber in the early 1990s before going pro, starting on an Amiga 2000 with two VCRs, an LD player, and a SuperGen genlock before switching to PC. I was still using tape and LD sources and mastering to SVHS for a long-ass time until capturing the video became feasible. I've actually burned out the motors on a couple VCRs doing timing the old way. That blank video file trick wasn't an option back then (it's very clever, though), but you need to be careful with luma keying because your black text outline also becomes transparent unless you make the outline and shadow a shade of gray that's dark, but light enough to not get keyed out. That happened in your example. My genlocks all used chroma keying, so I always used blue as the key color. One of them (a pair of internal PCI cards) also did alpha keying, something that actually could work under Sub Station Alpha to get super-crisp text and video overlay, but you had to render out each subtitle as a 32-bit image and replace each line in the timed script with an image load command. I dabbled with it, but the EDO memory used by my PC back then was too slow to keep up. It's actually just like how Blu-ray subtitles work now. The program we all used back then was Sub Station Alpha -- which does work under Windows 11; it's installed on the machine I'm typing this on -- to play the timed script back over a background color of your choosing. I also used its "Edit Mode Playback" mode to do on-the-fly timing until just last year. I've never done waveform timing, not even once in 30 years of subtitling. I was always faster using SSA and VirtualDub. I still use SSA to do my text entry. Aegisub is terrible for basic functions like that.
Well God Damn! I stand corrected! xD I really appreciate you taking the time to write this out, since despite my research the specific details like the ones you mention tend to get lost in the sauce as it were. It's also interesting hearing about the more professional side of things. I have another project I'll be working on later this year, which has to do with documenting the evolution of professional anime localization throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. I've been able to get ahold of production materials and dubbing scripts from several anime throughout that time that were dubbed and released on VHS in North America. I'm also looking to perform some interviews with industry professionals and turn it into a bit of a documentary project. If you would like to share your insights, and experiences, or know anybody else that would please shoot me a friend request on discord n we can chat! Cheers! My username is: smuggler_
@@The_Smuggler_I'll work out the Discord thing and drop you a line. My first fansub attempt was (checks) 1991, and I went pro in 96. I have all of my work material over the years - literally all, with everything from the physical era (scripts, storyboards, and VHS tapes) digitized - so I can offer insights on productions I was involved in, minus anything proprietary or learned in confidence.
man, some of those old Japanese medias sometimes valued like junk-cheap cropping up in mercari Japan, snagging them out of complete obliteration felt like duty, but having been to Japan with most of the trip plans to go to 2ndhand stores whenever possible, its not like they have any other uses but to end up in an old store somewhere :' )
I'm glad, before i was a weeb I was really into AV technology I'm glad I could make this well enough to be of interest to people outside of the niche. Cheers!
Ah that'd be simple enough. In my setup its just a external monitor connection thats feeding the subtitles. so to record anything extra, it'd be a matter of just dragging a picture of the laserdisc cover, over to the external monitor and hitting record on the vcr for a few seconds before stopping the recording and lining up that subtitle feed again. Only change would be turning off the luma key when showing the image and turning it back on to get the transparency for the subtitles.
You can add an event in the subtitle file that will load up and display a full-screen image, or you could display the image full-screen on your output for 5 seconds or whatever, pause the recording, and then start the subtitle playback as you normally would. Lots of us would add a little logo for our fansub group during the commercial break "eyecatch."
The other issue was this was pre-internet, though there WERE fans on GENIE, and some message boards. This made sourcing scripts (and help) very dificult, and also tended to set what you COULD and COULDN'T work on. Sometimes, you bought a disc, cause you HAD a script. Sometimes you did a show, because someone had a a disc and script (the "Dragon Knight" factor). I wrote the scripts on some pretty well known 80s works. But The biggest chunk was 22 episodes of Maison Ikkoku (AND the final movie). MI will make you work, everything has to mean 3 different things to 3 different people (and this was when no one knew what "Sempai" meant.
Our systems were quite puny. I ran on an Amiga 1000 with 1.5 megs of memory (I brought that up with a panel of old-timers, they were shocked I had that much, the audience by how little that was). Linier editing of scripts was a pain, but the true hell was doing an AMV "mosiac- style" linearly with a VCR with flying erase head.
Who knows, a few of my works may be floating around in old collections (I have pro credits that cycle into print once in a while.. I don't feel forgotten). Maybe somebody stole one my riffs (like ADV did when they used the MZ 23 gag for their Dirty Pair OVA scratch track..
Mad props to the OG weebs for doing all this work. Without them we wouldn't have this modern community
Right! When I first started looking into this I was really impressed by the creativity and technical skills of people back then. Crazy to think how much the industry has changed in 25 years.
🎉🎉 they did a lot for a phenomenal type of medium 😊
Oh man... I recall a guy here in Brazil who used to do that with his anime VHS collection he brought directly from Japan. Laser Disc was pretty much unknown and rare here in Brazil, but VHS fan subbing directly at lower quality did the job for anime that wasn't available on the TV or at VHS rental stores.
He had his own video contraption to place subtitles in a timely fashion and it was pretty similar... Tho... It was a wiring mess that I didn't knew how it worked, but the guy was an electronics wizard who also just happened to know Japanese and wanted to watch anime together with folks who didn't knew japanese. lol
Brasil teve sua própria história no fansub haha. Eu era criança nesses anos 90. Tava longe de conhecer anime. Mas conheci um pouco da história lendo revistas como animax e entendendo a dificuldade que era traduzir, vender as fitas e mandar por correio
It's incredible that people found ways to do this with analog media and methods. I can't imagine they made tons of money, they probably just wanted to share something they loved with friends and fans who were interested but couldn't understand Japanese. I wonder if this is how some of the folks at early US distributors like ADV and Animeigo got their start. Thanks for taking the time to make this- it's an important and poorly understood part of anime history.
AnimEigo definitely did, they had a extremely primitive setup of a type A tape deck connected to a macintosh Plus which then was connected to a D2 deck
The Mac plus program had to be extremely optimized to allow for the correct timing
AnimEigo has a great writeup on their history on their site
It really is crazy the jank people had to deal with and the work they had to put in back then, but I think thats part of what made it worth doing for alot of people. and it's awesome to see people other than myself still being interested in this stuff.
Thanks for the comment! n to quote one of the guys who commented on my post in r/laserdisc.
"We used to do this kind of stuff in our anime fan group here on the Texas Gulf coast back in the mid-90s. I personally used an Amiga with a video genlock and a Usenet account to produce handmade subtitles for Cleopatra DC, la blue girl, and a few other edge titles. Was minorly involved with AD Vision video at the time of their inception through our local anime club."
Nobody made money, they did it for the love of the culture! Like how youtube used to be 😂
As an "oldtaku" who started watching anime back in the early 90's, I'm eternally grateful to the dedicated fans, who went to such great lengths to give us the chance to watch series we might not be able to otherwise.
You randomly popped up in my recommended. I'm glad I watched the video, it was interesting seeing how anime was dubbed by fans back in the day :D
That's awesome! When I first started looking into this it blew my mind. lol I checked back on the analytics n apparently the algorithm gods are blessing this video, at least by my standards xD
This is a very interesting glimpse into the effort that classic anime fans went through to share content back in the day.
That's not least mentioning the need to understand Japanese _and_ good storytelling in the first place so as to translate the dialogue not only coherently but also appropriately to the scenario. In my short time of rudimentary fansubbing that's not an easy task yet the fact that the ancient masters not only dealt with it but also all the technical difficulties mentioned above is... awe inspiring, I guess.
There's still folks doing this for under-served languages. I know a guy who fansubs anime into Catalan!
i still have some fan sub tapes from when i was a kid! Love going back and watching their creative input cause there was no standardized subbing criteria yet :D
Burn Up is a lot of fun. Been on an OVA binge lately. After messing around with sub tracks in Resolve, it's cool to see the actual hardware for old school hard encoding.
I fell down a similar rabbit hole. I collected retro computers and also got into laserdiscs. I realized I had in fact all the equipment needed to reproduce the fansubbed VHS tapes I had watched when I was a teenager. With a Genlock and some original amiga software used for fansubbing that is still available I am able to watch my laserdiscs with live subs on my old tube TVs because that seems like a pretty millennial-boomer thing to do.
I'm glad I'm not the only one! The Millenial-boomer is a good description of how I feel when I blow the dust off this stuff. xD
Wow how do you not have more subscribers! Great work!!
haha I'm glad you liked it! In my defense, I only post a few times a year and some of it is random stuff I'm playing around with. xD
Heres a playlist of video's I made which I actually put a fair bit of effort into if you'd like to watch more! Cheers!
th-cam.com/play/PL8uBMFaUa1L6MGvzdtsDfVi96kG5Qj0Dh.html
@@The_Smuggler_ thanks for the reply! It kinda gives me Ross Scott vibes, from Freeman’s Mind / Accursed Farms, which is great :)
Just found a gem of a channel
When I was active there were already bots with download quene of newest on-air animes in Japan. I download the stuff and get translation scripts or ask ppl to translate stuff. Then I just use a the „tv out“ of the Grafikcard to record it on VHS tapes. Yeah was a good time some friends hang around at my first flat and all were into movies and or anime so we had full movies in .rm (real media or something.) it was like stamp size of movies fresh from USA and we copy them to vhs in Germany. Many horror movies we did from laserdisc to vhs becouse they were uncut ( we had strong laws in Germany for violence in movies ) well it was a great time and many people connect over me. But then the most absurd thing happened.. I got a girlfriend !
Thats awesome! :) judging by your channel name the passion for horror lives on. Shame most adventures end with a girlfriend haha Im sure if I had one i wouldn't be allowed to spend so much money on dumb crap lol
all that expense for a 9min video. Respect
Excellent information, the 90s straight to VHS anime was my favorite growing up. I just found myself going through some old favorites. :D
Also, 1000th subscriber 🎉
Thanks for the sub! N Im glad you found the info helpful! What a time to be alive when random weebs can buy this stuff on eBay. xD
this is such a cool video, i only got into anime in 2011 so its pretty awesome seeing the tech and processes ive only ever heard about before this
Thanks for the comment! I've always been into AV stuff but only got into anime in 2014, so I was pretty stoked to go down this rabbit hole. xD Kirino best girl.
@@The_Smuggler_ kirino kawaii!
@@brimless_ "Kirino can't be this cute" Been wanting to pick up the Kirino 1/2.5 scale figure forever. xD hmmm I just had a video idea.
@@The_Smuggler_ ooh yes id watch that! ive got my own collection of oreimo scales, ive got a few of the 1/7 and 1/8 Kirino and Ruri ones, but I never got the 2.5 one
Bro you need more subs! This is such an amazing vid!!!
That mixer is fuckin' sick, man
Right! Got it shipped in from an AV equipment seller in montreal.
couldn't believe how good the condition is.
I'd say there isn't more than 50 hours on it. I think I'll be incorporating it into future videos to bypass copyright claims. ©️
Also dope username xD
No idea why this was recommended to me. But it was very interesting.
Links below! N Dont forget to RING A DING THAT SUBSCRIBE BELL!
Edit: This video is doing really well compared to anything else I've made, thank you everyone for taking the time to watch. I hope you enjoy it!
William Chows Recommended Videos:
Differences between a digital fansub and an analog fansub:
th-cam.com/video/shtrn3QGcDk/w-d-xo.html
A real example of how to fansub Red Riding Hood Cha Cha using analog fansubs:
th-cam.com/video/wKIYu7ZX6uU/w-d-xo.html
A real time example of building an AMV using a laser disc and a flying erase head SVHS deck.
th-cam.com/video/mcXFvEjP5cI/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/f8DsSflzoCI/w-d-xo.html
Some of the tech used at Arctic Animation back in the day:
th-cam.com/video/-RBaeFxJMqE/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/arvl_DKJpmA/w-d-xo.html
Awesome video, thank you for sharing old tips.
My pleasure!
@@The_Smuggler_ I feel like I've been taught the secrets of gods haha. Awesome TH-cam channel you have :D
Great video! :)
Wellllll, you're in the ballpark, but the details are a bit off. I was a fansubber in the early 1990s before going pro, starting on an Amiga 2000 with two VCRs, an LD player, and a SuperGen genlock before switching to PC. I was still using tape and LD sources and mastering to SVHS for a long-ass time until capturing the video became feasible. I've actually burned out the motors on a couple VCRs doing timing the old way.
That blank video file trick wasn't an option back then (it's very clever, though), but you need to be careful with luma keying because your black text outline also becomes transparent unless you make the outline and shadow a shade of gray that's dark, but light enough to not get keyed out. That happened in your example. My genlocks all used chroma keying, so I always used blue as the key color. One of them (a pair of internal PCI cards) also did alpha keying, something that actually could work under Sub Station Alpha to get super-crisp text and video overlay, but you had to render out each subtitle as a 32-bit image and replace each line in the timed script with an image load command. I dabbled with it, but the EDO memory used by my PC back then was too slow to keep up. It's actually just like how Blu-ray subtitles work now.
The program we all used back then was Sub Station Alpha -- which does work under Windows 11; it's installed on the machine I'm typing this on -- to play the timed script back over a background color of your choosing. I also used its "Edit Mode Playback" mode to do on-the-fly timing until just last year. I've never done waveform timing, not even once in 30 years of subtitling. I was always faster using SSA and VirtualDub. I still use SSA to do my text entry. Aegisub is terrible for basic functions like that.
Well God Damn! I stand corrected! xD
I really appreciate you taking the time to write this out, since despite my research the specific details like the ones you mention tend to get lost in the sauce as it were. It's also interesting hearing about the more professional side of things.
I have another project I'll be working on later this year, which has to do with documenting the evolution of professional anime localization throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. I've been able to get ahold of production materials and dubbing scripts from several anime throughout that time that were dubbed and released on VHS in North America. I'm also looking to perform some interviews with industry professionals and turn it into a bit of a documentary project. If you would like to share your insights, and experiences, or know anybody else that would please shoot me a friend request on discord n we can chat! Cheers!
My username is: smuggler_
@@The_Smuggler_I'll work out the Discord thing and drop you a line. My first fansub attempt was (checks) 1991, and I went pro in 96. I have all of my work material over the years - literally all, with everything from the physical era (scripts, storyboards, and VHS tapes) digitized - so I can offer insights on productions I was involved in, minus anything proprietary or learned in confidence.
We lucky that we didn’t have to fansub it on vhs because we got it on streaming.
This video is going to get alot of views
man, some of those old Japanese medias sometimes valued like junk-cheap cropping up in mercari Japan, snagging them out of complete obliteration felt like duty, but having been to Japan with most of the trip plans to go to 2ndhand stores whenever possible, its not like they have any other uses but to end up in an old store somewhere :' )
The Activate Windows Subtitle got TH-cam to recommend this videoooooooooo
Personally not a weeb but this video is still interesting to me because old tech is cool lol.
I'm glad, before i was a weeb I was really into AV technology I'm glad I could make this well enough to be of interest to people outside of the niche. Cheers!
I was looking for some FXE-120 assistance, are you on Discord chief? And great video, very well paced and informative.
Glad you liked it! N Yea if you go onto the laserdisc sub-Reddit and join their discord I'm a moderator over there.
How does one add a static image through the genlock to the vhs? Like an image of the laserdisc cover?
Ah that'd be simple enough. In my setup its just a external monitor connection thats feeding the subtitles.
so to record anything extra, it'd be a matter of just dragging a picture of the laserdisc cover, over to the external monitor and hitting record on the vcr for a few seconds before stopping the recording and lining up that subtitle feed again.
Only change would be turning off the luma key when showing the image and turning it back on to get the transparency for the subtitles.
Ah ok thank you 🙏
You can add an event in the subtitle file that will load up and display a full-screen image, or you could display the image full-screen on your output for 5 seconds or whatever, pause the recording, and then start the subtitle playback as you normally would. Lots of us would add a little logo for our fansub group during the commercial break "eyecatch."
You should activate your Windows.
Ooo nice sony fxe
Ah interesting to know
wayta flex ur boomerage XD
At this point in my life, the slow march of time is the only thing I can trust.
lol Hope you like the video! xD
I like