Home : Sailormoon R Episode 67 : Technical notes

Technical notes

This fansub disc was made using the procedure outlined in my Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide. Source video was captured from laserdisc using a Pioneer CLD-D406 laserdisc player attached to a Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB capture card. All of the production work was done on my laptop. Here is a page containing more information than you could ever possibly want to know about my laptop.

Because this fansub was made on Linux using very simple software, it does not have many of the frills or production values that are common with modern fansubs, such as animated titles, karaoke lyrics, switchable subtitles, etc. (although the last item would have been omitted even had it been available). However, I am proud to say that my fansubs have the one thing that counts, namely, subtitles that are actually pleasant to read on a TV screen.

Materials included with the disc

Unlike most other fansubbers, I include my scripts and production materials on the disc. They can be accessed using any computer with a DVD-ROM drive. Linux users will find on the disc almost everything they need to reproduce or customize my fansubs. Even if you use another platform, you can convert the SubRip scripts on the disc to another format so that at least you don't have to start from scratch.

The source video was deliberately omitted from the disc, even though it could have fit. The reason is that I believe fansubbers should be required to obtain their own copy of the source video. Except for the source video, all of the other production items that I used to make the fansub are included.

The rest of this section is only relevant to Linux users. The materials on the disc are organized as follows:

You need to compile and install a patched version of transcode using the supplied centering patch in order to recreate my fansub. The two shell scripts encode.sh and script.sh in the root directory are used to launch the subtitling process. The script.sh program compiles the SRT scripts from srt/ into PPML scripts which are placed in ppml/. Note that there is a DELAY parameter in the first line of script.sh, to allow you to enter a (positive or negative) time offset in seconds in case your source video is shifted from mine. The encode.sh program then launches transcode to encode the subtitled video using the PPML scripts. (There are also parameters in the first few lines of encode.sh for specifying input and output filenames.)

I do not include helper scripts for mastering the DVD, but you can read my fansubbing guide for information about how to use dvdauthor to master discs in Linux.

Credits

All of the dialogue translations are my own. The song lyrics translations are by Alex Glover.

David Jao (djao@dominia.org)