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Blood+ SRT Subtitles

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TwileDragon:
Being unsatisfied with the vobsubs for Blood+ I extracted the English subs and did OCR on them. I then used SubRip and MS Word to find and fix OCR errors.

Now I have these nice SRT files which can be muxed in with the episodes for prettier, customizable subtitles. All to myself. And that feels wrong. I wish to share them. I was told that I should bring it up here and tell people about my process so they can, like, make sure I did stuff right. So here I am.

I used MKVExtract to pull out the files, SubResync to do OCR, SubRip to do automated corrections ("l" to "I", for example), and Word to find more complex OCR errors which created spelling problems. I did this for each of the 50 episodes. I kept copies of the SRT files at this stage.

Then I did something a bit more controversial. I made new copies and removed linebreaks in the subtitles where I deemed them unnecessary--when a single person talking stretches onto more than one line, for example. I retained linebreaks with things like song lyrics, where the subsequent lines were capitalized, but other than that a single person talking gets a single line. I did this for several reasons--first, the vobsubs were huge, so in some cases you'd have a mere 6 or 7 words split into 2 lines when they can easily fit on one if rendered at a reasonable size. I prefer for there to be fewer, longer lines because then the subtitles stay at the bottom of the image and creep into the frame less. For example:

- Hey! Where do you
think you're going?
- Er, nowhere!

goes to

- Hey! Where do you think you're going?
- Er, nowhere!

and

Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream

is unchanged.

As I said this is a bit controversial because some people like having shorter lines, or exactly what the DVD had, for whatever reason. Some people use programs which aren't that intelligent about dealing with long subtitle lines. I believe that players like Popcorn Hour will just let the subtitles run off the edge of the image rather than wrapping them over onto the next line. So this might not work for everyone.

Still, I kept the un-de-linebreaked SRTs for people who want them. Because I didn't pour over them line by line as I did my personal, fewer-but-longer-delined version, they might still have the occasional OCR error or two, spread out over the 50 episodes. I'm willing to offer them up if people want them, both versions.

Thoughts? Moving this to the right forum section? Questions?

Takeshi:
Well, I think this should've been posted in the Uploader's Forum but....

I'm just curious why you didn't use SHS's subs and did a OCR on them to offer them with Arigatou video. The main issue with Arigatou's release is that the DVD release of Blood contained a dubtitle based on the dub instead of a subtitle translated from the Japanese track. I don't know if there could be problems with removed scenes from the DVD release. But I would definitely like to see ORC'ed subs from SHS's release that can be used on Arigatou's video.

I recently did a OCR on my Animatrix offer, and I started to remove the two-line subs, too, and put it on one big line. Though I stopped it. But I can definitely see the advantage of having them in two lines. It eases the eye so it doesn't have to travel from left to right all the time. By this you only have to look down to read it, and look up again.

TwileDragon:
I didn't put it there because this is just like a perk for one of the torrents, not a torrent itself. I dunno, I'm new here ~_~

I used the Arigatou subs because, well, those are the ones I had access to, and because I know they match up with the other tracks. I assumed that if there were a better version of Blood+, that's what would be on BakaBT, because isn't quality the whole point of this site--torrents which are directly inferior are tossed in favor of those which are better quality? If the Arigatou version is what's here, I assume that the streams are better quality, and I'm not trading something vague like subtitle accuracy for something quatifiably and qualitatively better: codec efficiency and bitrate.

If by SHS you mean Shinsen-Subs (as I said, I'm new to this--not super familiar with group acronyms), then I didn't get subtitles from them because a) it'd waste 8.4 gigs of my download bandwidth just so I can get "better" subtitles which, for all I know, won't match up at all, and b) OCR'ing is a betch when you've got the words in their own stream, I don't want to imagine what fun it'd be to pull subtitles from a hardsubbed file.

I won't try to argue the advantage of a subtitle or dubtitle over the other, except to say that dubtitles at least preserve enough of the intent to make the experience understandable. Clearly, whoever dubbed Blood+ thought that the story, character interactions, etc made sense with the new dialog they cooked up, regardless of its authenticity.

I really prefer to remove the superfluous linebreaks even though it's crazy time-consuming (I mapped middle click to [left click, space bar, delete] so I just have to click at the end of a line) because I think the final product looks better (and I'm all about quality) and it forces me to check over the subtitles line-by-line which catches more errors.

Takeshi:
Anime Discussions is used to discuss the anime itself, and we're not really doing that so this'll probably be moved when the mods starts to punch in...

It's just that a lot of people have pointed out that it's just a dubtitle. Hey, you choose to make the dubtitle more attractive and that's awesome, you seem to have put a lot of work into this.

I haven't seen it so I can't say whether or not the dubtitle is good enough or not. In my Animatrix offer it seemed that most of the stuff got through the dubtitles, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear translators and old timers bitch about them. The company who released it has really been lazy.

When you're done you can put all the subs in an archive and ask the uploader to add it as an attachment. I would suggest that you refrain from styling them unless you know what you're doing. SRT subs are good enough.

But I'd still like to see someone OCR the subs of SHS's Blood release.

TwileDragon:
I welcome the mods to move it to the correct place :P

Yep, it is a dubtitle. But it's better than the one which was included in the Arigatou version. I guess I could've maybe made it better. Hell, I could've taken up Japanese and translated it myself. But my laziness has more bounds than my selflessness ;p

I didn't realize that the Animatrix had dubtitles. I thought it was originally made in English, and the Japanese was the dub?

Way I see it, a dubtitle can work one of two ways. They can translate it well for the subs and then use those as a script for the dub, or they can use lip movement to dictate less accurate translations, which they then use for subtitles. The former is double plus good, and the latter is double minus bad.

I did put them in an archive and ask the uploader to add it as an attachment. He suggested that I discuss it with people here first D: I intended to do flat SRTs with no styling, as I only like ASS subs when they make good use of custom fonts, display effects, placement, rotation, etc. I haven't even seen Blood+, I'm not going through the trouble to style it appropriately ;p

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