Anything you need to know about Saizen Speedsubs

Saizen Speedsubs will probably never be used again, it will either be Saizen Hacksubs or simply Saizen.

 

I decided to make this section in order to not have anyone asking questions, so read this carefully.

1.What is Saizen Speedsubs? Saizen Speedsubs is more or less Saizen, but with less or no QC. For now this tag will only be used for Captain Tsubasa, starting with episode 38.

2. Why Saizen Speedsubs? Since I started the Captain Tsubasa project I’ve been very tired of slow progress on the project (read 2-5 weeks to QC one episode). In addition to slow work, people were just not communicating well enough, and I was very close to just quit. That is why I thought it was about time to do something, but for a long time, I didn’t have the resources. This was until recently when konnakude said he wanted to edit two episodes a week, and presented me to one of his translator friends. After that, we were lucky enough when tyroz said yes to help encoding, so now we’re 2-3 translators working on this, and 2 encoders.

3. What to expect? I’ll be honest; if you’re a fansubber, you’ll notice a dip in quality because we’ll simply skip steps if people haven’t done their task under 48 hours. The only steps we won’t skip are translation checking and editing, but if the typesetting isn’t done in time, so be it. Same with the quality checking. Most people will probably not notice much, though.

4. Will you you do normal high quality Saizen releases later? Probably not, but who knows? Most of us are busy people with busy lives, so chances we’ll just try to get through this series without Saizen’s usual care for high quality.

5.What are your goals? As long as the encoders, translators and editors do the work we’ve planned to, we’ll be aiming for two episodes weekly. If we finish the project remains to be seen.

28 thoughts to “Anything you need to know about Saizen Speedsubs”

  1. I hope some people wont say “ugh, the quality is so bad, why didnt u have take ur time?” after “cant u go faster”… 🙂

  2. We really appreciate all of your hard work and effort.. Captain Tsubasa classic my favorite anime.. thanks saizen

  3. I applaud this decision. Fansubbing should not be tedious for the ones doing it. On the plus side, if someone wants to improve their QC skills, they are free to do so with these releases 🙂

  4. I just have a question about fansubbing in general. I don’t actually watch this series.

    What do quality checkers do? Earlier you said “hopefully the quality checkers will do their job in timely manner so we can release more soon.”

    Which is surprising to me because the thing I’d assume would take the longest is translation.

    I only know about developing indie games or romhacking. And in those, QC can be a pain because games are dynamic and always changing, making problems hard to replicate.

    There’s probably something I’m missing though. Forgive my ignorance.

  5. Actually, I did what I should have and looked it up elsewhere (agh, sorry). It’s still a bit of a vague job description though.

    I guess my question then is how much do quality checkers change in the final script?

  6. You check that every part of the fansub is done properly. The quality checkers on this project just happen to be busy/forget about the project. They haven’t even been replying to e-mails lately, which is why I got really fed up by the situation. Yes, quality checking should be the quickest job if people have done their job properly.

  7. I see. That sucks. From the sounds of things, I thought it was some massive undertaking. Figures it would be that instead.

  8. Agh, bad double posting habit.

    On the positive side, hopefully you’re not missing too much seeing as how these people haven’t really been doing much. Have they ever caught any huge glaring mistakes?

  9. It’s just as sango-san said… The qc job depends on how well the rest of the team have done their part. It can vary from “not needed” to 20k error reporting ;p ;p ;p It’s just what it sounds… You check the quality of something, from all aspects. Same goes for indie game development, programming, you name it…

  10. Translation shouldn’t be that time consuming, unless you have to look up a bunch of stuff. Editing might take a while if the translation isn’t that good in terms of English. Typesetting might take a fuck ton of time sometimes, if the signs are many or advanced. QC usually doesn’t take more than an hour at most. Timing: 30-45min (unless you’re ninjacloud). That’s how I look at things. ^^

  11. Quality checkers literally do that – they check the quality. There’s all these little mistakes, like typos, grammatical mistakes, a wrong font, names or terms that are inconsistent with the previous episodes, text in a flashback that doesn’t match with what was said originally, a line that might show up too late or too early, a short line of text when there’s lots of speech (or the opposite), etc. etc. Basically, as a QC, you closely watch the details and report them.

    Without this error checking, the viewer is probably going to notice some odd mistakes. It’ll feel like an unpolished sub.

    Currently, only sangofe and I seem to be actually doing the QC (I admit I have been slow on the uptake in the past), and sangofe only does it because of this lack of active QC’ers (even though he does the translation too). Before the speedsubbing decision, we required to have three QC reports done by three different people before continuing. This stalled the entire process for up to weeks. That’s now changed to “the QC phase ends in 48 hours, no matter how many people do it”.

  12. “QC usually doesn’t take more than an hour at most.”
    Well, it depends. For a non-RC QC, for me it’d usually take at least twice the duration of the ep. If the subject at hand is in bad shape, it can take twice that, easily…

  13. Thanks guys for the explanation. It’s interesting to hear how to process works (or even how it sometimes doesn’t)

  14. I’d agree on the fact that my QC’s that happen after a bunch of other have had their notes applied is in quite good shape. =) An hour is still plenty of time imo, but yeah, always depends on the state the episode is in.

  15. Well, that’s basically why the project (and the other ones of the team) got dropped in Frenchies-Subs, too bad to see the same problem happening here again.

    It was a terrible struggle to find some editors, we had one that was pretty regular (here since the start of the team) and when he dissapeared, we decided to stop (especially as it was a service that was given to the english audience, we are not english native people so we shouldn’t even care for english subs at the beginning).

    The main problem is that lot of people like fansubs, but when some help is required, it’s always pretty hard to find some peoples (which shouldn’t be, edit just require good english skills, and no one will make me believe that only a few people in the english fansub community have some, there are rather just lazy and don’t want to help).

    But I hope the project will be finished one day, that would mean we reached our goal 🙂

  16. We don’t really have any staff problems now, although it’d be nice to have 1-2 more qc’s. If we get that, we’d be back to the usual Saizen QC amount though, so it wouldn’t be “speedsubs” anymore. To be honest, we’ve had 3 people qc’ing instead of the usual 4-5 in Saizen.

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