Fushigiboshi-Subs - How Do You Do It?

I figure some of y'all out there might be interested in what I do to sub episodes of Futago Hime, so I'll give a quick overview of the process I go through here.

1. Obtain a good raw video file
Pretty easy to understand there. Have to have a high quality raw to get the best results. Most raws for Futago Hime I have are near 300MB in size.

2. Timing
My preferred program for timing is Subtitle Workshop by URUSoft. I load up the raw video file in it then get to work timing the dialogue. Subtitle Workshop has a nifty feature where I can do "timing-on-the-fly", simply pressing Alt+Z when a line of dialogue starts, and Alt+X when a line ends, which makes things pretty quick and easy. I rarely get the timing down exactly when doing that, so I make adjustments afterwards.

3. Translation
A rough first translation is done while timing in Subtitle Workshop. For some reason I like doing the episode in chunks of a few minutes or so, timing some, then translating. I also make a note when one of the main characters who has a different style (color, font) speaks so I can add that in later while typesetting. If I need to look up a word I'm not familiar with, WaKan and the dictionaries at Infoseek and Alc are my friends. Sometimes very good friends when my vocabulary fails me (^^;;)

After completing the timing/translation, I check to make sure that most everything is in good shape before moving on. I save the file in Sub Station Alpha format (*.ssa).

4. Typesetting
I use good ol' Sub Station Alpha to make the "styles" -- different fonts and colors -- that I use, mostly to differentiate characters' dialogue. It was a pretty obvious decision to use different colors for the princesses ;)

The section in the above screenshot is from the OP sequence, which required quite a lot of work to do. The instructions in {} are scripting commands available for use in SSA, and some are more advanced commands available in ASS (Advanced Sub Station Alpha format) for absolute positioning of text, and also effects, such as the text getting bigger and smaller during the iya-iya dance as shown below.

5. Encoding

Before encoding, I check over everything again and make sure correct styles were used and that the translation and timing are also accurate. I do that by using VirtualDub, along with a plugin for VirtualDub called TextSub which places the subtitles in the video. Since my computer isn't the fastest out there (Athlon XP 1600+), sometimes I'll have to use DirectVobSub to check subtitles if VirtualDub won't preview them smoothly.

Once I'm just about absolutely sure everything is okay and ready to go I set my DivX encoding options to give a file size near 175MB. Most of the time that's a bitrate of around 850kbps, using B-frames, with MP3 Lame audio of 128kbps, using 2 passes, 23.97fps. And then I wait... it takes about 2 hours to finish a complete encode.

After encoding is finished, I check things again to make sure they came out okay and the quality is acceptable. If everything's ready to go...

6. Distribution
I upload the encoded file to a place where the people who help me distribute the file can get it, and after I'm done with that I create a torrent file and upload it to the tracker and begin seeding. The other distro people help me seed after they retrieve the file, which helps out a good bit -- I've only got about 14KB/s upload most of the time (^^;;;)

7. It's Finished!
And then y'all get on the torrent, download it, and hopefully enjoy it :) Hope that gives you an idea of what it takes to get an episode of Futago Hime out there. If I'm really, really, motivated I can do all of that in less than a day, as I did with episode 2. But since that was rather tiring I do it bit by bit now ;)