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Are all american DVD releases so ugly?

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Zalis116:
TL;DR Version: DVD subs are limited by hardware standards from 1997, and designed for readability on old CRT screens. Look at the linked screenshots below to see if all of them are like Moribito or not.

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DVD players may get newer, but unfortunately the specifications for fonts and colors remain stuck in 1997. So no options for changing color/placement, afaik. And many fonts that fansubbers freely use are copyrighted and require payment to use commercially, which is why CrunchyRoll subs are also limited in their font choices. As for the yellow colors, I heard an explanation from someone who works in the DVD subtitling field at the "World of Fansubbing" panel at Anime Central 2008. Basically, that particular saturation of yellow is a color that doesn't appear much in anime or other media. Thus it doesn't have much risk of blending into the background, especially with black borders as insurance. Personally, I don't see why yellow is inherently worse than any other color, and I'd rather have it over fansub-style white subs with one-pixel borders and no shadows that don't stand out from the background at all.

On the placement, they're placed up higher not only for overscan considerations, but also because they're easier to read that way. If they're too low (again, like most fansubs), then you constantly have to bounce your eyes down to the bottom of the screen, and risk missing out on action taking place elsewhere in the image. Really, a line of X characters at a margin of 10 takes up the exact same amount of space as the same line at a margin of 40. Imo low margins make subs more obtrusive, since you have to expend more effort scanning your vision to read them. Yes, they can be too high. But my point is, there are reasons why DVD subs are the way they are -- to make subs readable against any color of background, on any display no matter how crappy, and for a wide range of viewer eye/vision quality.

 In my experience, Media-Blasters' (AKA Anime-Works) subs are higher and larger, relative to other companies' releases. For the sake of convenience, I went ahead and prepared screenshots to show off the range of styles used by different licensing companies and adaptation studios.
ADV: Old | Middle | New
AnimEigo
Bang Zoom (Geneon/Bandai - 2002-05)
Bang Zoom (Geneon/Bandai - 2006 - present) [I blame this large size for the R1 Haruhi subs sucking so badly]
Captions Inc. (Geneon/Bandai/Viz ~1998-2001)
Central Park Media (old; other titles use yellow in similar styles or the AnimEigo-type subs)
Funimation (up to 2003)
Funimation (2004-present)
Manga Entertainment
Media-Blasters/Anime-Works (before 2002 or so)
Media-Blasters/Anime-Works (~2003-2005) **note how the height of the subs is at roughly the same height where the Japanese placed the song lyrics for viewers to read**
Media-Blasters/Anime-Works (2005-present) [I would assume this style is used in Moribito]
New Generation Pictures (mostly Geneon)
Ocean Group (Bandai/Geneon)
Odex (Singapore outsourcing - Geneon/Bandai)
Rightstuf/Nozomi (up to 2004)
Rightstuf/Nozomi (2005-present)
Viz

And for Takeshi, a few examples from non-anime DVDs: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon || Star Wars Episode III

Unlike many around here, I don't see DVD-style subs as that bad. But also unlike many around here, I continue to watch everything on low-res CRT screens, which is what DVDs were made for. So that's probably why I see them differently. At the same time, I do think companies are foolish for sticking to their practices in the face of all the complaints about them. It's not like it would cost them anything in terms of money or readability to make the subtitles white instead of yellow, a little smaller, and a little lower in the image. I would suggest taking complaints to the Anime on DVD forums, as companies are more likely to listen to things posted there than on torrent sites.

Havoc10K:

--- Quote from: ant900 on November 29, 2009, 09:31:07 PM ---  Though having an entire series on one disk would be nice.




--- End quote ---

:3

something l know hahahah

tough, l preffer fansubs still, DVD releases are at least uncensored, but as said above, they are only released on a DVD, it's just a medium, it would be the same as releasing it on a pendrive, the content is what matters, and some DVD releases have bad hard subs, in this factor l like releases done in my country, l have them done in :
English Dubs (wich suck most of the time)
Japaneese Dub + Speaker Translation (Wich is a lot better than eng bullshit)
Japaneese Dub + English Hard Sub/Fansub (usually selected by order of some really good group, eventually fixed)
we don't have Polish subs on most of our DVD releases for Anime, wich l am glad for, kinda feel weird to read it that way ahahaah.

Xiong Chiamiov:

--- Quote from: Drew on November 29, 2009, 09:23:15 PM ---I can't wait for DVDs to go away forever. Way too many problems with them. Everything needs to be Blu-ray or digital.

--- End quote ---
Funimation offers decently-priced downloads, but they're DRM-protected (so I can't even play them since I don't use Windows), not to mention hardsubbed SD Windows Media files that look like they were encoded by... me.

At least, that was my experience from the trial episode I bought when they first started that.  I sent a longish email to them complaining about how they didn't list specs on the site (!) and they had them up within a few days, so if you email them, know that they do in fact read your messages.

But yes, the fact that I cannot get official releases that are near the quality of unofficial ones (for most modern shows) disturbs me a bit, and shows that there's something wrong with the market.

deciduous:

--- Quote from: Zalis116 on November 29, 2009, 10:03:26 PM ---A list of images that has me burning my eyes out.
--- End quote ---

It makes me wonder why they don't turn up the neon knob a little more and introduce the fabulous lime green or orange. The last anime DVD I bought was Blue Submarine No. 6 and, I have to admit, the subtitles were far uglier than the fansub equivalent. Not to mention the timing was... off. Here's to hoping they kick it up a notch and forget ye olden days of yellow unicode.

As for DVDs, I kind of like them despite the fact that they're about to become as archaic and outdated as cassette tapes. However, I still have Chobits burned onto 8 or so CD-ROMs. I shouldn't be talking. I'm all for going digital. The beauty of an external is unbelievable (since I'm reduced to lugging a laptop to classes). Anime just "needs" something like iTunes to step it up a notch and aggregate downloads for the popular series.

kurandoinu:
iTunes have started to offer a few series's available for download (in the UK at least, no idea how many are available in the US). They are however rather expensive and I have no idea what the quality is like. And they're only available dubbed.

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