We built our own KLT point tracker to make "Onscreen Text Substitution" stick to moving cars and/or during camera pans.
We reverse engineered Winny (a Windows-only filesharing software) to build a Linux server with WebUI so that you could conveniently remote-control a server in Japan.
We built a C-like language with AOT compiler that actually creates machine code to make particle effects render faster.
We used spectrogram analysis to assist with separating the audio track for along karaoke animations.
And of course there was multiple competing xdcc servers.
And then there was the truly crazy stuff like a TSR bootloader for your PS2 which would hook drawing calls in memory so that you can fan-translate video games, too.
We truly had an insane amount of cutting-edge tech back then, if you consider that this was just some people's hobby to enjoy Japanese content.
Used to do this kind of stuff (a long long time ago), first in ASS and later in After Effects. After Effects was real fun! Put in a lot of effort into making signs look the same as the original Japanese.
Wonderful to see Flip Flappers have that bit of over-representation that it so richly deserves. It's a true work of love, so it's not surprising to see fansubs of it reflect that as well.
Judging by fan adoration, I get this feeling that anime in Japan are not made by ginormous animation companies trying too hard to produce the same samey conformant goop as everybody else, which seems to be a problem that EE.UU. and Europe do have. Or am I wrong?
Otaku/doujin culture, and the creative industry that rose around it in Japan, is as good as it gets when it comes to finding good ideas and propping them up. Basically anyone who can draw can release their own manga/webnovel/illustrations on pixiv, twitter, and others, get a couple volumes out with this or that publishing house, see where it goes and whether the public catches on. Self-publishing plays a huge part in this, whether it's doujinshi (self-made [often derivative] books sold at conventions like Comiket, Comitia, or online, with a substantial proportion of r-18 [but not only] content), doujin music albums, indie games and visual novels, etc.
Funding for anime adaptations is plentiful, and fan support helps bridge the confidence gap where production committees (consortiums of multiple publishing/IP companies pooling the money to distribute the risk) won't go for more indie / experimental works. Profit is recouped on developing the brand and merch, while leaving plenty of room for directors and studios to establish their own auteur identity. Studios are getting leaner and more focused these days, splitting off into smaller entities kicked off with a project or two with more margin for talent to shine.
It's not all perfect, though. Freelance work and lack of mentoring has really put a dent into the supply of new animators, who lack job security and often swing between studios left and right, but there are industry efforts to fix this and preserve knowledge, with the oldest pioneer animators now starting to hit their 60's and 70's.
Please explain how “funding is plentiful” for the industry - as an American Musician and artist, I am truly curious how money is available to creatives in Japan in this sector. Thank you!
It's plentiful in PPP terms I suppose. Japanese wages are very low, they wouldn't be able to fund even one of those ugly Netflix adult comedies where it's made in Flash and called Big Balls or something.
You're probably only being exposed to the best and most notable anime, which is giving you a very skewed perspective. In fact every season (anime releases follow a seasonal pattern; Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) there's tons of same-y and uninteresting trope-filled anime. Most seasonal anime just takes some basic premise as a starting point and then it fills in the rest of the details with tons of tropes, or it copies the key details from other successful entries in the sub-genre. If you started following every anime season you'd quickly notice how many derivative anime are released each season.
You can check it out for yourself, go to anilist.co, and filter for Year 2024, and then filter again for each Season. There's tons of fad-chasing, aside from the major standouts. It's honestly a shame because some of these slop-tier anime still tend to get beautiful animations, but their stories and writing in general is really bad. Sometimes you get an F-tier story with S-tier animation.
> you'd quickly notice how many derivative anime are released each season.
Never could get used to the term 'derivative' in that context. Everything's derivative. Hard to know what word to use instead, but I just wouldn't attach an adjective in the first place and just skip past it. For instance, I don't call a particular reality show derivative, I'm just not really going to be interested in the first place, odds are.
I'd say that this is a wrong take considering how many seasonal anime these days can be described by the template "______ used to be an ordinary Japanese dude who got transported to another world with an overpowered skill".
No you would not be correct. In fact the explosion of certain genres of anime have been extremely cookie cutter.
Thats not to take away the enormous contribution made by fansubbers. Some of them are absolutely amazing. I remember seeing some of these techniques used in School Rumble years ago, and they also went out of their way to translate visual puns for western audiences.
There's a quality filter over it because people don't want to translate all the slop. In particular Kadokawa has seemingly replaced half the industry with bad "isekai" fantasy novel adaptations.
But there's also several long running toy commercial series for kids like Pretty Cure. They're better than any other country's toy commercials but still that.
As someone who's done made use of most of the techniques listed in these posts, some comments...
First of all, it's nice to see them receive attention outside the fansubbing scene! Anime has long made use of on-screen text in ways that most other mediums don't, and with the limited animation the medium is famous for, it tends to be extremely amenable to localization that aims to replicate that on-screen text presentation as closely as possible. With fansubbing, this is largely due to the power of the ASS (Advanced SubStation Alpha) subtitle format, and the Aegisub editor's capabilities for making use of that power (none of which is a coincidence - ASS was effectively developed for subtitling anime, and the same goes for Aegisub). Of special note is Aegisub's Automation features, which allow users to write Lua scripts to extend its capabilities, even building various extra GUI bits and bobs to make them usable for any non-coders.
To comment on one of the techniques in particular: it's always kind of fun to see people be impressed by masking, because technically speaking it's one of the more simple tricks that people do with ASS. The format includes basic vector drawing capabilities, which can be used to also make clipping masks for subtitles. How masking works is that usually the typesetter will be simply drawing vector clipping masks to clip the subtitles properly, frame-by-frame. Due to the limited animation, this usually doesn't take all that long. If the covering object remains static in shape, you could also just draw the mask once and then use motion tracking and an automation script to move it for the duration of the masked line. So all in all, not very complex, just a bunch of manual effort :)
And speaking of which: one of the biggest innovations of anime fansubbing happened around 2011-2012, when fansub groups started making use of motion tracking en masse. The popular program for doing the actual motion tracking was Mocha[1], and then various tools were used to apply its After Effects -compatible motion tracking data to typesetting lines in Aegisub. This development eventually culminated in Aegisub-Motion[2], which has been the de-facto motion tracking script for Aegisub for quite a while.
Motion tracking is also the main thing still lacking when it comes to typesetting in official anime releases today. This mostly comes down to the fact that while fansubs can have fancy motion tracked typesetting completely softsubbed since they expect their releases to be watched on reasonably powerful PCs, the same doesn't really apply to the much more limited and less powerful subtitle render used by official services. But honestly speaking? That's mostly just an excuse for the official services to not even try. You could have the fanciest on-screen text presentation in the world if you just burned your on-screen text translations into the video (hardsubbing, as opposed to softsubbing). Yes, this approach would work just fine even for multiple languages - modern video streaming is already based on short segmented chunks, so all you'd need to do is develop a system that will make multiple hardsubbed variants of only the segments where on-screen text is actually present. With this, for the vast majority of video, you would only need one variant. I developed the bones of a system like this myself for some official anime streaming I worked on some years back (unfortunately no longer available), and it very much was extremely feasible. This kind of segmented hardsubbing is even possible on Blu-ray, so the technique is disc-feasible too.
In conclusion, I completely, 100%, concur that I'd love to see a lot of these techniques be used with official anime releases. Especially since it would be very much possible to apply just about all of them as long as a publisher was simply motivated enough to make it happen.
The irony is that in older official releases in the VHS era we'd get that sort of effort towards localization, but the purists really hated it.
I had a prototype setup worked out for video that actually did convert ASS -> video stream that you could overlay on top a number of years back, but never took that anywhere.
I saw it years ago with my ex and liked it but I can't remember what it's about (well it's two girls fighting evil but) and never ended up rewatching it
I recently watched a terrible anime where a girl got thrown out of a building for some reason.
I don't remember anything about the anime except that the subtitles spun end over end and flew off the screen in perfect sync with the girl. It was beautiful and probably the best thing about the series if all I can remember from it is that one sub.
I can't give you the exact episodes, but the series:
Blurry Text For Fuzzy Hearing: Dimension W
Fading Text For Fade Transition: Made in Abyss
Reflected Text On Reflecting Surfaces: Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid
Onscreen Text Imitation: First Flip Flappers, then KonoSuba
Onscreen Text Substitution: First Flip Flappers, then Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid
Subtitle Text Distortion: Again, Flip Flappers
Karaoke: Flip Flappers
Masking: Alice & Zoroku
Well this brings back some old memories :)
We built our own KLT point tracker to make "Onscreen Text Substitution" stick to moving cars and/or during camera pans.
We reverse engineered Winny (a Windows-only filesharing software) to build a Linux server with WebUI so that you could conveniently remote-control a server in Japan.
We built a C-like language with AOT compiler that actually creates machine code to make particle effects render faster.
We used spectrogram analysis to assist with separating the audio track for along karaoke animations.
And of course there was multiple competing xdcc servers.
And then there was the truly crazy stuff like a TSR bootloader for your PS2 which would hook drawing calls in memory so that you can fan-translate video games, too.
We truly had an insane amount of cutting-edge tech back then, if you consider that this was just some people's hobby to enjoy Japanese content.
I think I came onto the scene probably 5 years after you did. Ours was the Share and Perfect Dark era :)
Many computer nerds among anime enjoyers.
Used to do this kind of stuff (a long long time ago), first in ASS and later in After Effects. After Effects was real fun! Put in a lot of effort into making signs look the same as the original Japanese.
Wonderful to see Flip Flappers have that bit of over-representation that it so richly deserves. It's a true work of love, so it's not surprising to see fansubs of it reflect that as well.
Never expected to hear about that series on HN lol
Judging by fan adoration, I get this feeling that anime in Japan are not made by ginormous animation companies trying too hard to produce the same samey conformant goop as everybody else, which seems to be a problem that EE.UU. and Europe do have. Or am I wrong?
Otaku/doujin culture, and the creative industry that rose around it in Japan, is as good as it gets when it comes to finding good ideas and propping them up. Basically anyone who can draw can release their own manga/webnovel/illustrations on pixiv, twitter, and others, get a couple volumes out with this or that publishing house, see where it goes and whether the public catches on. Self-publishing plays a huge part in this, whether it's doujinshi (self-made [often derivative] books sold at conventions like Comiket, Comitia, or online, with a substantial proportion of r-18 [but not only] content), doujin music albums, indie games and visual novels, etc.
Funding for anime adaptations is plentiful, and fan support helps bridge the confidence gap where production committees (consortiums of multiple publishing/IP companies pooling the money to distribute the risk) won't go for more indie / experimental works. Profit is recouped on developing the brand and merch, while leaving plenty of room for directors and studios to establish their own auteur identity. Studios are getting leaner and more focused these days, splitting off into smaller entities kicked off with a project or two with more margin for talent to shine.
It's not all perfect, though. Freelance work and lack of mentoring has really put a dent into the supply of new animators, who lack job security and often swing between studios left and right, but there are industry efforts to fix this and preserve knowledge, with the oldest pioneer animators now starting to hit their 60's and 70's.
Please explain how “funding is plentiful” for the industry - as an American Musician and artist, I am truly curious how money is available to creatives in Japan in this sector. Thank you!
Sakugabooru's blog has much information on the internals of anime production. This article answers some questions about the production committee model: https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2017/05/02/what-is-an-animes-pr...
It's plentiful in PPP terms I suppose. Japanese wages are very low, they wouldn't be able to fund even one of those ugly Netflix adult comedies where it's made in Flash and called Big Balls or something.
You're probably only being exposed to the best and most notable anime, which is giving you a very skewed perspective. In fact every season (anime releases follow a seasonal pattern; Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) there's tons of same-y and uninteresting trope-filled anime. Most seasonal anime just takes some basic premise as a starting point and then it fills in the rest of the details with tons of tropes, or it copies the key details from other successful entries in the sub-genre. If you started following every anime season you'd quickly notice how many derivative anime are released each season.
You can check it out for yourself, go to anilist.co, and filter for Year 2024, and then filter again for each Season. There's tons of fad-chasing, aside from the major standouts. It's honestly a shame because some of these slop-tier anime still tend to get beautiful animations, but their stories and writing in general is really bad. Sometimes you get an F-tier story with S-tier animation.
> you'd quickly notice how many derivative anime are released each season.
Never could get used to the term 'derivative' in that context. Everything's derivative. Hard to know what word to use instead, but I just wouldn't attach an adjective in the first place and just skip past it. For instance, I don't call a particular reality show derivative, I'm just not really going to be interested in the first place, odds are.
The most popular new show of the year is anything _but_ derivative (DanDaDan)
Ever seen Mob Psycho 100?
[flagged]
I'd say that this is a wrong take considering how many seasonal anime these days can be described by the template "______ used to be an ordinary Japanese dude who got transported to another world with an overpowered skill".
No you would not be correct. In fact the explosion of certain genres of anime have been extremely cookie cutter.
Thats not to take away the enormous contribution made by fansubbers. Some of them are absolutely amazing. I remember seeing some of these techniques used in School Rumble years ago, and they also went out of their way to translate visual puns for western audiences.
There's a quality filter over it because people don't want to translate all the slop. In particular Kadokawa has seemingly replaced half the industry with bad "isekai" fantasy novel adaptations.
But there's also several long running toy commercial series for kids like Pretty Cure. They're better than any other country's toy commercials but still that.
Famously, Hayao Miyazaki makes cartoons with western compliance inspired by Bambi (1942).
As someone who's done made use of most of the techniques listed in these posts, some comments...
First of all, it's nice to see them receive attention outside the fansubbing scene! Anime has long made use of on-screen text in ways that most other mediums don't, and with the limited animation the medium is famous for, it tends to be extremely amenable to localization that aims to replicate that on-screen text presentation as closely as possible. With fansubbing, this is largely due to the power of the ASS (Advanced SubStation Alpha) subtitle format, and the Aegisub editor's capabilities for making use of that power (none of which is a coincidence - ASS was effectively developed for subtitling anime, and the same goes for Aegisub). Of special note is Aegisub's Automation features, which allow users to write Lua scripts to extend its capabilities, even building various extra GUI bits and bobs to make them usable for any non-coders.
To comment on one of the techniques in particular: it's always kind of fun to see people be impressed by masking, because technically speaking it's one of the more simple tricks that people do with ASS. The format includes basic vector drawing capabilities, which can be used to also make clipping masks for subtitles. How masking works is that usually the typesetter will be simply drawing vector clipping masks to clip the subtitles properly, frame-by-frame. Due to the limited animation, this usually doesn't take all that long. If the covering object remains static in shape, you could also just draw the mask once and then use motion tracking and an automation script to move it for the duration of the masked line. So all in all, not very complex, just a bunch of manual effort :)
And speaking of which: one of the biggest innovations of anime fansubbing happened around 2011-2012, when fansub groups started making use of motion tracking en masse. The popular program for doing the actual motion tracking was Mocha[1], and then various tools were used to apply its After Effects -compatible motion tracking data to typesetting lines in Aegisub. This development eventually culminated in Aegisub-Motion[2], which has been the de-facto motion tracking script for Aegisub for quite a while.
Motion tracking is also the main thing still lacking when it comes to typesetting in official anime releases today. This mostly comes down to the fact that while fansubs can have fancy motion tracked typesetting completely softsubbed since they expect their releases to be watched on reasonably powerful PCs, the same doesn't really apply to the much more limited and less powerful subtitle render used by official services. But honestly speaking? That's mostly just an excuse for the official services to not even try. You could have the fanciest on-screen text presentation in the world if you just burned your on-screen text translations into the video (hardsubbing, as opposed to softsubbing). Yes, this approach would work just fine even for multiple languages - modern video streaming is already based on short segmented chunks, so all you'd need to do is develop a system that will make multiple hardsubbed variants of only the segments where on-screen text is actually present. With this, for the vast majority of video, you would only need one variant. I developed the bones of a system like this myself for some official anime streaming I worked on some years back (unfortunately no longer available), and it very much was extremely feasible. This kind of segmented hardsubbing is even possible on Blu-ray, so the technique is disc-feasible too.
In conclusion, I completely, 100%, concur that I'd love to see a lot of these techniques be used with official anime releases. Especially since it would be very much possible to apply just about all of them as long as a publisher was simply motivated enough to make it happen.
[1] https://borisfx.com/products/mocha-pro/
[2] https://github.com/TypesettingTools/Aegisub-Motion
Oh shi- why I am not surprised to see Daiz on HN.
The irony is that in older official releases in the VHS era we'd get that sort of effort towards localization, but the purists really hated it.
I had a prototype setup worked out for video that actually did convert ASS -> video stream that you could overlay on top a number of years back, but never took that anywhere.
Hiya Daiz, hope you're doing well after all these years
OMG it's Flip Flappers. Watch Flip Flappers.
I saw it years ago with my ex and liked it but I can't remember what it's about (well it's two girls fighting evil but) and never ended up rewatching it
I recently watched a terrible anime where a girl got thrown out of a building for some reason.
I don't remember anything about the anime except that the subtitles spun end over end and flew off the screen in perfect sync with the girl. It was beautiful and probably the best thing about the series if all I can remember from it is that one sub.
This needs proper citations for the episodes used as examples.
I can't give you the exact episodes, but the series:
Blurry Text For Fuzzy Hearing: Dimension W Fading Text For Fade Transition: Made in Abyss Reflected Text On Reflecting Surfaces: Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid Onscreen Text Imitation: First Flip Flappers, then KonoSuba Onscreen Text Substitution: First Flip Flappers, then Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid Subtitle Text Distortion: Again, Flip Flappers Karaoke: Flip Flappers Masking: Alice & Zoroku
Thanks! That's some more for my watchlist.