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Are all american DVD releases so ugly?

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DaggerLite:

--- Quote from: Neco on December 03, 2009, 04:18:17 PM ---Regarding  dubs or other perks "not being wanted"  that is your preference as a consumer,  and it ends there.  You cannot compare a fansub which exactly catered to your tastes,  to a retail dubbed / subbed product as a whole, which is marketed to a decidedly different mainstream crowd than your own tastes.
--- End quote ---
You misunderstand. It's not that a dub is "not wanted." It's a bad dub that's not wanted. If the dub is going to be considered as a factor, it should be done well, not some free 6-hour job by some friends of the Funimation staff. It has (in my case) nothing to do with the quality of the translation, but the actual dubbing job of the people involved. They sound completely retarded. Part of it I'd guess is because they don't translate names at all, so they sound like retarded "weeaboos" trying to pronounce Japanese names all the time, even. Of course, not all dubs are bad. When you look at Disney work, you see what it should be like. But when looking at certain other stuff, I can't help but cringe. Why you are protecting them for just doing a half-assed job is beyond me.


--- Quote from: Neco on December 03, 2009, 04:18:17 PM ---I never see (or hear of) anyone actually trying to send a message to these companies or at least try and start a feedback dialogue.
--- End quote ---
This is done by not blindly buying their half-assed products. Why would I bother writing them messages they won't listen to? They're trying to make money, and they figure they do that best by contributing a mass of low quality work rather than a smaller amount of quality work. They may be telling you that they have a passion for anime in their extras, but you'd think they'd at least do a better job, then.

I'm not an American in the first place. While they don't have license for distribution over here, American licensors somehow still manage to enforce their rules upon our fansubbers, and I've seen plenty of zone 2 releases of their subs. Perhaps it's just Wikipedia that is mistaken about it. Even so, why should I have to send them mails about making their stuff less crappy? Why should I have to tell them how to do their job? It should be their goal to make a good product before the mails start ticking in.

I'm sure some of their staffers are reading replies just like mine on forums anyway.

Note: There's usually never more spaces after another in an English text.

kenshin-dono:
well i was about to reply to necos post but looks like dagger beat me to it and with pretty much the same thoughts i had =P I know a lot of people prefer dubs, thats fine, but that doesn't mean go ahead and put out a piss poor one with hacks who obviously dont seem to give a damn about what they're doing.  It also doesn't mean you can just handle the subs as an afterthought.

how many dvds out there have 5.1 in both the english and japanese track? Almost none, most will maybe have 5.1 for the god awful english dub, but the japanese track gets regular stereo.

As to getting in contact with the companies.. PLease. Like they give 2 craps about the fans. Odds are you'll get some generic form letter back and it wont even get read. I gave up trying stuff like that after sending an email to the creators of Psi-ops back in the day about a serious game breaking bug they had that killed a very enjoyable game. It seems so much easier for these groups  to use big ugly ancient fonts and have hobos off the street voice the dubs for a sandwich.

Xiong Chiamiov:
Vobsubs are what you see on DVD releases.  They are also known as imagesubs, because they are (as I understand it) essentially images, rather than text.  This gives the typesetter the ability to place things exactly where wanted, but also sticks you with the font size and color that they chose.

Zalis116:

--- Quote from: kenshin-dono on December 04, 2009, 05:14:25 AM ---well i was about to reply to necos post but looks like dagger beat me to it and with pretty much the same thoughts i had =P I know a lot of people prefer dubs, thats fine, but that doesn't mean go ahead and put out a piss poor one with hacks who obviously dont seem to give a damn about what they're doing.  It also doesn't mean you can just handle the subs as an afterthought.

how many dvds out there have 5.1 in both the english and japanese track? Almost none, most will maybe have 5.1 for the god awful english dub, but the japanese track gets regular stereo.


--- End quote ---
So fonts can be ancient now too, just like colors? Is that why fansubbers don't use simple, practical fonts like Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, Helvetica, Century Gothic, Abadi, Comic Sans,* Lucida and the like anymore, in favor of unreadable serifed crap? I don't see anything wrong with using colors and fonts that were functional and practical 15 years ago, because they're still functional and practical today for the same reasons they were then. Can anyone tell me when the magical cutoff date was, when a certain portion of the visible light spectrum suddenly became "old"? Also, my understanding is that DVD subs have to be a certain minimum size or bigger, or else they'll run into flickering issues against interlaced video. So once again, it'a a technical issue.

*Okay, I'm kidding about the Comic Sans  :P

Really, I think you're painting dubs with too broad a stroke. The average quality has gone up, and there've been more and more exceptionally good dubs in the middle years of this decade. You don't see very many exceptionally bad dubs anymore, except for a few that got outsourced to Singapore. (And then there's the Nanoha/A's and Familiar of Zero S1 dubs, which were essentially fandubs.) In fact, more and more DVDs have been coming out sub-only these days, as companies look to cut costs on niche/marginal titles. So the issue of "paying for dubs you don't want" isn't as much of a factor as it used to be.

And why is it only anime fans that take issue with additional audio tracks, anyway? Lots of US movies and TV shows come with dubs in French, Spanish, or other languages, yet I don't see mainstream buyers saying "why are they putting this Portuguese shit on my Simpsons discs?"

"Subs as afterthought:" Yeah, it happens, but it's not always the case. If you want an example, give this torrent a download, and tell me that those subs look like "afterthoughts."

As for Japanese 5.1 audio tracks, they often don't exist in the first place. See here:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2009-11-06

And it's also possible that the Japanese themselves don't allow the Jpn5.1 on R1 discs, for fear of reverse importation. We saw with Gundam 0079 that they didn't allow the Japanese track on the R1 DVDs in any form, since it hadn't come out on DVD in Japan at the time. And with the Kurokami Blu-Ray release, we can see that reverse importation fears are still alive and well. So basically, there's more going on than "evil R1 companies sadistically depriving consumers of Japanese 5.1 sound."

Neco:
Dagger,

You cannot expect a company whose first and primary goal is to make their profit to always be oriented towards what people want, and doing so in such a fashion as they just "know".  They will put out what they can get away with, for the price they can get away with.

If you choose not to buy dubbed Anime because you don't like the quality of the dubs, then that's your right.  But how do you realistically expect anything to CHANGE if you and everyone else have the exact same feeling?   If its not worth writing to, or organizing a massive feedback effort directed at these companies,  then maybe its NOT that important to you in the first place.

It's pretty easy to put it all on the shoulders of companies, and expect them to hire people just to troll forums looking for negative feedback to write down,  but for all we know they already do that, and they may have determined that the quality of their work is sufficient compared to the ratio of people complaining.

But really,  if its truly that important to you,  then do something about it.  Otherwise  you're just another one of the,  most likely, vocal minority.  Things don't change unless people decide to change them.    A handful of fansub watchers not buying R1 DVD's in protest of the quality doesn't send any kind of message to anyone,  other that your money is insignificant to their bottom line.

This is a universal concept no matter where you live in the World.  Its why we have sweat shops, and loads of other crap issues going on all the time.  You have to expose the sweatshop and damage the image, or their bottom line to convince a lot of companies these days.  Its just the way it is.  A few hippies protesting a Nike (or whoever) sweatshop product out of principle don't put a dent in Nike's profits.   A big news expose' or an organized well thought out boycott does.  (I use Nike for example purposes, I don't remember who it was in the 90's that got into that mess).

Until those truly concerned with the quality of English dubs and subtitles  get up off their asses, and actually start organizing with one another to try and get something done, things will not change  faster than the natural phenomena of a few standout employees within a company would allow for.   Anyone expecting otherwise is fooling themselves.

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