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Blood+ SRT Subtitles

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Zalis116:
Since you were looking for controversy, here's a little case for 2-line subs  ;D

--- Quote ---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.
--- End quote ---
Two-line subs are used in a lot of DVDs and more intelligent fansubs for a reason -- it's simply easier to read short 2-line subs than long 1-line subs. Basically, it's not a matter of "vobsubs are too big to fit on 1 line"; the 2-line subs are intentional. As explained here:


--- Quote ---first, our subtitles are often two lines (two short lines are easier to read than 1 long line because they can fit into your foveal vision and be read with little or no side to side scanning by your eyes),
--- End quote ---

Having 1 long line means that viewers have to spend more mental energy scanning across the screen reading the subs, thereby increasing the chance of missing out on other areas of the image. Same with having subs way down at the very bottom of the screen -- viewers have to constantly "bounce" their vision downward to read the subs, and then back up to see what's going on. So in a way, 1-line subs at the very bottom of the screen spanning the entire width of the image (like typical fansubs) are more "obtrusive" than short 2-line subs slightly higher up (like most DVD subs), because they demand more active energy and attention to read. Also, subs that stay away from the very bottom and extreme sides of the screen won't get hit by overscan on older displays, like if people are outputting to a CRT TV.

A given amount of text will always cover the same amount of space, regardless of how high it's placed or how many lines it's broken into. So if it's going to be covering screen space either way, it's better to make it easier to read. Besides, the human eye can interpolate what lies behind the letters. And if people absolutely must see something, they can always switch the subs off for a moment if the subs are soft.

That's why I intentionally put hard line breaks in the subs I work on. Fortunately, the same effect can be accomplished at the viewer level by increasing horizontal margins, which is what I do with most softsubbed fansubs and rips. Still, forced line breaks at logical points can make lines more coherent. For instance,

Go to the store and buy \N
a head of cabbage

is more coherent than

Go to the store and buy a
head of cabbage.

Now, I do agree with tweaking things to avoid 3-line subs, and I have seen some DVDs take it too far, like "How do \N you do?" in AnimEigo's Otaku no Video. Also, Aeigsub (the program most fansubbers use) has a spell-check, and you can also use Find+Replace to remove line breaks if you want to. Just search for \N and replace with a space or nothing.

TwileDragon:
I still maintain that linebreaks in SRTs are usually crappy, just like linebreaks on websites can be crappy. You don't make a website to be read with a fixed font size and window size, nor should you for anime. I might change the font style and size to better suit my preferences, distance from the screen, resolution, etc. With my approach, and any decent player, you can limit the number of characters on one line and it'll automatically add the linebreaks during playback. Flexible. With the hard-coded linebreak approach, all you do is lose the distinction between a necessary linebreak (song lyrics, new person talking, etc) and those which seemed good at the arbitrary font size the subtitle maker was using.

I mean, isn't that half the point of SRT (the other half being better resolution scaling)? The ability to pick font, size, characters per line, position on screen, and more? Which also nullifies the point about overscan, because you can adjust the subtitles to be higher in the screen.

I mean I understand the need to have subtitles the way they are on DVDs that are shipping, and even on Blu-rays. They're intended to be viewed on TVs, TVs which might have the overscan issues you mentioned, with devices that can't always be counted on to do fancy stuff like rendering in an arbitrary font at an arbitrary resolution. Things that most people probably don't care about very much. But that's just not the case with SRTs.

I can't blindly remove linebreaks though, because they're needed for cases where multiple characters are talking, you have song lyrics, and other special cases that don't come to mind immediately.

So my overall point, although some people might say it's more comfortable to have shorter lines, that can be achieved in software per the user's preferences for SRT files.

Havoc10K:
long lines are terrible no matter how convenient they seem to be, in the case of long speaking yo ucan short it out as well with

l went to the parl to play a violin for my friends
    because l love them and l love violin too

in a monolog

instead of

l went to the parl to play a violin for my friends because l love them and l love violin too

wich you imply from what l'm reading, this is simply bad, because when you do that, viewer needs to read the whole thing before he can look at the screen, while in two liners it's a lot shorter, because our eyes already catch the second line as we read the first one and it's faster to read the second line.

adding a third line would also be a bad thing as it would take away too much space.

l went to the parl to play a violin
for my friends because l love
 them and l love violin too

it takes actually more time to read this way because the second line keeps interrupting the reading of the third line, l often found myself pausing in such moments and even then my eyes couldn't focus on the screen and went to the second line. this is the reason why most fansubber groups stopped using multiliners and stick to 2 liners, even if that means faster reading pace, or pausing for a second because the text might switch too fast, even if the sentence is long but stil lmenages to be in 2 lines before it flashes into next sentence, keeping a 2 lines ratio is the most efficient method.

when you do those fixes you should also be careful with timing, some subs are like you listed


--- Quote from: TwileDragon on February 17, 2010, 07:38:28 PM ---For example:

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

goes to

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

--- End quote ---
but in some cases the timing in subs can be even brought to one line per 3 seconds so it can easily become :

- Hey! Where do you think you're going?
[3 second period between voicing while the character looks around or something]
new line
- Er, nowhere!

this is also used more frequently whenever avaible, so you should keep an eye out fir such scenes.

good luck with your work.

TwileDragon:
They're the opposite of convenient. It takes at least 2-3 minutes for me to edit the linebreaks out of a 22 minute anime episode. Multiply by 50 episodes and that's easily 2 hours of extremely monotonous work. But I do it because I prefer how it looks. And anyone else who does is certainly welcome to my subtitles. People who don't can have the older version of the subtitles, before I removed the linebreaks. Although at this point, nobody has expressed interest in them, period.

In cases where there's a lot of dialog, the preferrable thing to do, I think, is to use ... to break it into several different sets of subtitles.

I went to the parl to play a violin for my friends...

...because I love them and I love violin too

with the second line appearing after the first has vanished.

Because I don't watch the subtitles with the anime as I edit them, timing issues might in theory occur, although I don't really understand how. The time it takes for your eyes to scan from the first line to the second is absolutely minimal and shouldn't impact what line you're reading when certain characters start talking. Even if it does, there's so much variation in a person's reading speed that there's no guarantee at all they'll be at the right point at the right time, anyway. If there's a long enough temporal gap that reading speed is an important consideration, or if dramatic effect is so important that what you read has to match what's being said just right, then they should really break the subtitles up so they don't all appear on the screen at once. Which they often do.

If anyone actually wants my archive of the before and after SRT files, I can provide them, and you can use or edit or butcher them to your heart's content.

Havoc10K:
l really don't have anything against your work, maybe you could apply to some fansubbing group or something, you certainly picked up a long series to fix subs for, if l were you l'd try with 11-12 eps series first, there are some that could use a fix certainly, l personally don't really give a damn about 2-3 liners, l just read, it's like a book.

l know that editing this stuff takes a huge load of monotonious time, l was running Ragnarok Online server in the past and that was also a long work, in many cases l was simply editing stuff and uploading patched versions, this can be really monotonious, also editing pictures is also a dull work sometimes, if you really want to do this don't complain, no one asks you to do it, youre doing it mainly for yourself and possibly for others, l think there will be ppl that apreciate you work, that in it'sefl should be enough of a reward, in that regard, eighter continue or drop if you don't really want to do this.

the time when l was watching this series was like 3-4 years ago and l marathoned this and it wasn't all that great to me back then, maybe l should rewatch it, l don't even remember whose release l have but l have the 2 lined one.

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