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Subbing visual novel OPs/EDs (Release inside)


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There are two points to this thread:

First: A project I'm working on (that we're not quite ready to go too public about) uses Bink 2 for video playback, so last week I wrote and just published a proxy library to add ASS subtitle support to Windows games using Bink 2. Sub as fansubbers normally would (except you need to target libass (VLC etc.) rather than VSFilter), drop files into your game directory, done. Probably doesn't work with every such game, since there's a number of ways to use Bink 2 and I've only considered the one that my title uses, but it would be very easy to adapt to additional ones - if you're trying to use this and it doesn't work for your game, feel free to ask me about it. Wasn't sure where else (on the Internet) to post it - I'd happily take suggestions!

Admittedly not a lot of VNs use Bink. While Bink, shipping as a DLL with a dead-simple C API, makes this extremely simple, a hacker should have little trouble doing the same for any other game/VN.

Which brings me to my second point.

I'd like to discuss the idea of subbing the opening and ending songs in visual novels. I'm surprised I don't see it very often - compared to translating the text it's a tiny amount of additional work, you can make it toggleable so people who don't want to see it don't have to, and it provides something extra to what you'd get with the Japanese original or an official translation. I don't really see a reason not to do it.

Any comments?

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Perfect world? There's no reason not to, especially with tools like the one you've been working on. But I imagine a lot of teams are stretched thin as it is. They're fortunate if they have the manpower to get the TL out at all, never mind hacking optional soft subs into the opening/closing themes. It ends up being relatively high work, low reward. 

When we did KoiRizo, it was basically a last minute decision to include song subs. I ended up just timing the whole thing out in After Effects and hard subbing it along with the title translations. The patched movies were included as optional downloads and, honestly, it ended up feeling like way more work than it was worth. 

I would have killed for a better option. Which is to say, you're doing God's work. :D

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For what it's worth, I love when OP/ED songs have subtitles (bonus points: both romaji and translation on separate lines). I only recall ever seeing any kind of subbing like this in anime, never in VNs. Since apparently KoiRizo has it, I am once again reminded that I should probably play that at some point just to see Darbury's work, especially if he went to that trouble...

Anyway, if you're talking about an official project, there are usually additional legal ramifications with subtitling the songs. Music has lots of very specific licensing agreements, I guess; apparently this is the reason officially-licensed anime often doesn't have subtitles (I'm shaking my head at you, Crunchyroll). Even if those licenses can be obtained, it's more time and effort than they can go through before they rush the regular subtitle release out, and so it simply never happens, at least with streaming sites (curse you, Crunchyroll; bless you, Sentai).

But as far as fan projects, I expect those additional legal concerns are a drop in the bucket, so rock on.

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On 6/3/2016 at 4:41 AM, Darbury said:

Perfect world? There's no reason not to, especially with tools like the one you've been working on. But I imagine a lot of teams are stretched thin as it is. They're fortunate if they have the manpower to get the TL out at all, never mind hacking optional soft subs into the opening/closing themes. It ends up being relatively high work, low reward. 

When we did KoiRizo, it was basically a last minute decision to include song subs. I ended up just timing the whole thing out in After Effects and hard subbing it along with the title translations. The patched movies were included as optional downloads and, honestly, it ended up feeling like way more work than it was worth. 

I would have killed for a better option. Which is to say, you're doing God's work. :D

In our case, softsubbing was actually the easier option (there's no free Bink 2 decoder - so you'd have to hack one together using a game's DLL - and no encoder either; there's one for Bink 1 videos which can also be played by the Bink 2 library, but reencoding to that would leave us with massive files and low quality). We also have time to kill on this project because we're waiting for something external, so we're kinda in the best position to do this :)

That said, as far as the technology goes, almost every project that has a hacker should be able to do this, since they probably wouldn't have to work for the entire duration of the project anyway. For reference, the feature took me only a couple hours, and I'd estimate it would've taken me about 2-3x that with a less convenient engine. Huge exception being console projects. We're currently (privately) looking for someone to actually make the subs, but if we can't find someone our image editor's gonna do it, who'd also just have free time otherwise. Which leaves transcription and translation. Yeah, resources are always tight on that - all I can say is, songs are shorter than routes and it's fun to do lyrics every once in a while ;)

On 6/3/2016 at 5:16 AM, Fred the Barber said:

Anyway, if you're talking about an official project, there are usually additional legal ramifications with subtitling the songs. Music has lots of very specific licensing agreements, I guess; apparently this is the reason officially-licensed anime often doesn't have subtitles (I'm shaking my head at you, Crunchyroll). Even if those licenses can be obtained, it's more time and effort than they can go through before they rush the regular subtitle release out, and so it simply never happens, at least with streaming sites (curse you, Crunchyroll; bless you, Sentai).

Which is precisely why I'm suggesting fan projects do it. It's one thing you definitely won't see in official localisations. I stand corrected.

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6 hours ago, DrDaxxy said:

Which is precisely why I'm suggesting fan projects do it. It's one thing you definitely won't see in official localisations.

Quite many Mangagamer releases (especially recent) actually do have subtitled OPs. For example Tokyo Babel.

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