The Old School Otaku Lounge

Hi everyone!

I'm so glad to have discovered this forum. It brings me back to my childhood haha

A little bit about myself, I started fansubbing during the digisub era back in 2004, but I discovered anime through the old RealMedia encodes of Sailor Moon from VKLL and Studio Chikashitsu's VHS fansubs. I was only 12 at the time and definitely couldn't afford to buy tapes for myself, so I'm lucky to have been able to discover fansubs via IRC. Once my family upgraded from 56k dial-up to cable, I started my own fansubbing group Anime-Himitsu and ran that until I finished high school and moved on.

About a decade ago, I started a project senshifansubs.wordpress.com where I was able to collect all the old VHS fansubs of Sailor Moon (which I had been wanting for 10 years) thanks to some kind donations as well as fansubs.ca (my first experience actually sending money in an envelope to Canada and waiting to get tapes back!) and I digitized all my tapes to preserve a bit of history as well as my childhood. Then I let that site die in 2014 once Sailor Moon got licensed in North America again.

A few months ago, I started my site back up again. Someone had uploaded my encodes onto the Internet Archive, but some episodes were missing and I had been wanting to re-digitize my tapes again at a 1:1 ratio without any filters and postprocessing, so I started my re-digitizing journey.

That's when I discovered there was actually a small subgroup of people who were still collecting VHS fansubs, and people who were digitizing them onto the Internet Archive. I loved that idea so now I've begun my own journey of collecting VHS fansubs

Hey welcome to the forums. I'll keep your internet archive page open so I can get all that stuff on my ext HD at some point.

Welcome to the forum! I've just recently started my digitizing journey from my analog collection, so it'll be nice to confer with another person here. Interested in hearing more about your early 2000s fansubbing days, too - I translated a couple things for the group Shin-Getter probably between 2006 and 2009 but I only did the translation script, all of the actual production of the subbed file was done by other people in the group. I have a few things I want to sub myself now, so if you're familiar with it, I'd appreciate any insight you may have!

Drew_Sutton wrote: ↑Mon Feb 06, 2023 7:10 pm I have a few things I want to sub myself now, so if you're familiar with it, I'd appreciate any insight you may have!

Unfortunately my fansubbing insight is quite dated, and I'm also running on a Macbook now instead of Windows. But back in the day, I used Aegisub to time all my subtitles, it was a pretty powerful tool. And I used VirtualDub with AVISynth for encoding, I believe I did that for MP4 files too when we shifted into HD... That part is a little blurry for me haha DKop was looking to sub a few things too, maybe you two could get together!

chibiboi wrote: ↑Tue Feb 07, 2023 8:39 am Unfortunately my fansubbing insight is quite dated, and I'm also running on a Macbook now instead of Windows. But back in the day, I used Aegisub to time all my subtitles, it was a pretty powerful tool. And I used VirtualDub with AVISynth for encoding, I believe I did that for MP4 files too when we shifted into HD... That part is a little blurry for me haha DKop was looking to sub a few things too, maybe you two could get together!

I'll take older knowledge over my current lack thereof! I'm on Linux myself, so I figured I might have to hunt down a similar enough software package if AegiSub and VirutalDub aren't open sourced or have a compatible free version. But any help along the lines of the process beyond writing a translated script would be beneficial, too (and probably hasn't changed too much). I'll hit up DKop, too!

Drew_Sutton wrote: ↑Tue Feb 07, 2023 7:57 pm I'll take older knowledge over my current lack thereof! I'm on Linux myself, so I figured I might have to hunt down a similar enough software package if AegiSub and VirutalDub aren't open sourced or have a compatible free version. But any help along the lines of the process beyond writing a translated script would be beneficial, too (and probably hasn't changed too much). I'll hit up DKop, too!

Well it sounds like you've got the basis of it! I used Aegisub to time and typeset the subtitles, and then used AVISynth to filter the raw and apply the subtitles, then AVISynth or Handbrake or something similar to encode. It was useful to encode a low quality version of the raw to import into Aegisub to preview your subtitles more efficiently. And you can play around with subtitle styles as well.

Welcome to the forums! Glad to have yet another member who realizes the importance of backing up such things. I appreciate you sharing your history, too. ...Ah, the days of hanging out in IRC channels. I kind of want to check out Aegisub now.