Tofu Panda Survey Summary and discussion

Hey everyone! I’m sure you’re excited to see the survey results. I’ve been sitting on an answers sheet for a while now coming up with stuff to answer. I picked a few that came up many times or others that i found interesting. Instead of me answering every single question i was hoping this summary along with the most frequent questions we got, will create some kind of discussion amongst yourselves and would then inspire us to answer more. Thanks for giving us such wonderful feedback!

[b:3e6pq931]Here are the three pictures the question was refering to:[/b:3e6pq931]

http://imgur.com/a/fD0nV

[b:3e6pq931]Charts:[/b:3e6pq931]

http://imgur.com/a/w9liS

[b:3e6pq931]Answered questions:[/b:3e6pq931]

https://goo.gl/EhB488

I hope these questions and answers give you something to talk about. And remember, feedback is appreciated. Stay cool. Thanks! :)

Nice that the results seem to favor allowing more time and not rush rush for a quick release. :)

[quote:362g2qa6]Since we deal with effects, custom fonts and a lot of on screen things, having the softsubs would clash with your video playback and it wouldn’t make sense to have them separate because you would also need the fonts we are using. [/quote:362g2qa6]

Personally I think just Arial is fine for everything, it’s very easy to read and widely available. There’s a number of simple effects you can do with Arial that won’t clash with video players (borders, colours, weight, backgrounds, shadows, spacing etc.) and you can overlap lines on top of each other for a different effect, just position them the same but style them differently (e.g. opaque box ticked on one and not the other). For the factors holding back releasing a soft sub, maybe you can do a poll to see how important they are to the viewers (e.g. custom fonts, advanced effects).

[quote="soudou":39mynrl5]Personally I think just Arial is fine for everything, it’s very easy to read and widely available. There’s a number of simple effects you can do with Arial that won’t clash with video players (borders, colours, weight, backgrounds, shadows, spacing etc.) and you can overlap lines on top of each other for a different effect, just position them the same but style them differently (e.g. opaque box ticked on one and not the other). For the factors holding back releasing a soft sub, maybe you can do a poll to see how important they are to the viewers (e.g. custom fonts, advanced effects).[/quote:39mynrl5]

Yes it does seem to boil down to personal opinion. Take a look at these screenshots i took just now, it was very spontaneous, i’m sure there are better examples but this is what i did:

http://imgur.com/a/5o9Hh

In the question "Would you prefer good quality subs or do you want to see episodes being released quicker", i had three answers to choose from. "More frequently" "No preference" "Well done sub". And that’s exactly where the dilemma lies. As i’m a typesetter, and you are too, i find it much more important to make an episode LOOK good with the extra hour of effort thrown in there. Notice the last picture in the album i sent you. That’s all arial, and was not chosen by myself. At the moment, i feel making a high quality episode is priority. You never know when your translator is going to be available and considering how much work goes into the episode already why not make it visually appealing? To quote myself from the google doc:

[quote:39mynrl5]I have complete sympathy for people who prefer having the subtitles separate, I really do.[/quote:39mynrl5]

I seriously have it. Cause there are legit arguments. But if you want to choose between a 700mb video file and separate arial based subs with lesser overall quality and feel as opposed to a 700mb video file complete with custom fonts, nice effects and satisfying feel. What are you going to choose? And why choose the first? That’s my reasoning.

[quote="Otviss":26ci4oa9]In the question "Would you prefer good quality subs or do you want to see episodes being released quicker", i had three answers to choose from. "More frequently" "No preference" "Well done sub". And that’s exactly where the dilemma lies.[/quote:26ci4oa9]

I think when you say "Good quality sub" most people are going to assume you mean translation quality, which will suffer if people are forced to make rush decisions on how best to interpret a line from Japanese to English.

[quote:26ci4oa9]As i’m a typesetter, and you are too, i find it much more important to make an episode LOOK good with the extra hour of effort thrown in there. Notice the last picture in the album i sent you. That’s all arial, and was not chosen by myself.[/quote:26ci4oa9]

The last picture, I think the main issue is legibility as the font and border weight is thin, so the text is getting lost on the black shadow. I tend to always set Arial to bold and make the white border thicker.

I think the the real vital thing is the colours, a few deaf Gaki viewers have said they greatly appreciate that, it’s like a pseudo speaker label.

As an artist, I understand where you’re coming from though. I guess one option would be to have the fancy stuff for the hardsub then open the sub in Notepad, and replace the fonts with "Arial" (or copy-paste some all-purpose Arial styles). I tend to stick to Arial as it’s a san-serif font which makes it easiest to read. Those super stylized Kanji they sometimes do are a right pain for my text capture thing to even recognize. It’s largely a functionality thing, back in the day chairs were super ornate and fancy, then Bauhaus design came along, now they’re more boring but also very functional for multiple uses. :rofl:

[quote:26ci4oa9]But if you want to choose between a 700mb video file and separate arial based subs with lesser overall quality and feel as opposed to a 700mb video file complete with custom fonts, nice effects and satisfying feel. What are you going to choose? And why choose the first? That’s my reasoning.[/quote:26ci4oa9]

I tend to like soft subs for Gaki due to already having the raws. Re-encoding takes a hit to the quality and the text tends to be crisper as it’s hardware-based font rendering not pixels. I haven’t made many softsubs for obscure stuff I’ve done though since no-one is likely to have the raws. :rofl:

I think some would opt for the softsub so they can have the option to show or hide the text to see what’s underneath (the cast or Kanji), in that case they won’t mind how it looks so long as it’s removable.

[quote="soudou":2udcz8xk]I think when you say "Good quality sub" most people are going to assume you mean translation quality, which will suffer if people are forced to make rush decisions on how best to interpret a line from Japanese to English.[/quote:2udcz8xk]

I really dont have any power over translation quality. Unless i notice too many mistakes but then i’ll let the translator know. When i say good quality sub i probably mean "Overall quality". Good coloring, easy to read, etc.

[quote="soudou":2udcz8xk]I think the the real vital thing is the colours, a few deaf Gaki viewers have said they greatly appreciate that, it’s like a pseudo speaker label.[/quote:2udcz8xk]

It’s good to have in mind. One thing i do is in the beginning of episodes when they show names of the cast like "Downtown - Hamada masatoshi - Matsumoto Hitoshi" Instead of coloring them as the actual font which would be white with black outline and light blue shadow, i put their dialogue font and color so you’d know that okay, Hamada is blue, Matsumoto is red and so forth.

[quote="soudou":2udcz8xk]I tend to like soft subs for Gaki due to already having the raws. Re-encoding takes a hit to the quality and the text tends to be crisper as it’s hardware-based font rendering not pixels.[/quote:2udcz8xk]

I’ve tested it before. Even on "Ultra speed" in my encoding program it does not make the quality of the image worse. Look here:

http://imgur.com/a/c2HQp

[quote="Otviss":1b86i1h3]I’ve tested it before. Even on "Ultra speed" in my encoding program it does not make the quality of the image worse. Look here:[/quote:1b86i1h3]

It’s slightly softer in places but not noticeable at a glance. Still when Team Gaki gave the option of a soft sub and a hard sub for the last batsu, I did go with the soft sub.

I guess ultimately those asking for a soft-sub are more focused on functionality, the lower image has no subtitles and that’s not possible with a hardsub.

[quote="soudou":3rkujlx0]I guess ultimately those asking for a soft-sub are more focused on functionality, the lower image has no subtitles and that’s not possible with a hardsub.[/quote:3rkujlx0]

Personally its more functional without the soft subs. But. People who ask for soft subs are 90% of the time sitting on the raws already so. I’m not sure i follow you. The lower image has no subtitles and that’s not possible with hard sub well… There you go. Get the raw then?

I mean i really do understand the functionality in like… switching them off here and there for what ever reason but, in the end, it would require tampering with the file…

[quote="Otviss":28oma6q7]Personally its more functional without the soft subs. But. People who ask for soft subs are 90% of the time sitting on the raws already so. I’m not sure i follow you. The lower image has no subtitles and that’s not possible with hard sub well… There you go. Get the raw then?[/quote:28oma6q7]

Yeah playing the raw and the hardsub separately is definitely an option. You would have to get both though since without the hardsub there is no translation. With the batsu that was a few GB each at least, so I just got the soft sub and had done with it. :D

[quote="soudou":4c2tb2dv]With the batsu that was a few GB each at least, so I just got the soft sub and had done with it. :D[/quote:4c2tb2dv]
No problem in seeing how it was convenient for you :D