you learn something new and wonderful every day

ErMaC · Post by **ErMaC** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 2:31 am

Holy shit, people still have that stuff? Dear lord.

OK, time for some background here.

FIVE YEARS AGO, when I was in high school, I was getting into anime via old school tape subbing. First thing I got ALL of was Sailor Moon, cause I'm a big freakin Moonie. Go look at my top 10 anime list

Anyways, I have a capture card handy because my dad used it to watch TV on his computer. And I have a whole bunch of Master tapes from VKLL with all of Sailor Moon on it. And before I got all my tapes, I had been driving myself nuts trying to find downloadable fansubs online, which all looked like total ASS, 160x120 with awful sound, so you couldn't even read the damn subs. And I'm a system administrator at my high school, with my own little boxen sitting in the server room.

Hmmm...

So I decide to start doing encodes of the tapes. This was back in '98 I think when I started doing it, which is about concurrent with the other two groups which were doing it at the time, Parasite Anime, and another group who turns out was here at UCI at the time who did digital encodes of Kenshin fansubs and distroed on CD. So we all started doing the same thing hardcore at around the same time, and we were all using the same tools - RealProducer G2.
Keep in mind, G2 was freakin' STATE of the ART when I started this. DivX was still just a brand new DRM-protected DVD format, and everyone was still on modems (I was mostly too, during that time). So when I started making my encodes at... jesus how big were my files? Lemme see if the CDs I burned 4 years ago still work... Yup they work! 36MB an episode. And wow that was burned on one of the 80 minute CDs that I bought specially from MicroMedia in San Jose because you couldn't get 80 min CDs anywhere else and they let all of a season fit on 2 CDs instead of 3. Oh the memories.

Anyways, so when I started making encodes at 36MB an episode, this was freaking HUGE. INSANELY large. People complained my encodes were too big. But I refused to make them any smaller, because while at this resolution they sure weren't perfect, they were watchable. I actually went through two different capture cards, the latter being my Asus V3800 Deluxe with Video-in, which I still have sitting on my desk here (trusty old video card hasn't failed me yet, although its drivers have - Asus never made working Win2K drivers for it, so no capture in 2K for me).

Anyways, over the course of like a year I would post another 2 or 4 episodes to my site every week. By the end of it I blew through:

Sailor Moon episodes 2,5,6,20,42,44,45,46 (the first season episodes either removed entirely, or edited down into a single episode like 45 and 46)
Sailor Moon R episodes 73-89 (the "lost episodes", which then later were dubbed and I removed from my site).
Sailor Moon S episodes 90-126 (whole season)
Sailor Moon SuperS episodes 127-167 (whole season)
Sailor Moon Sailor Stars 168-200 (whole season)
Sailor Moon SuperS Specials, and Ami-chan no Hatsukoi
and all three movies (even the Black Dream Hole one which blew ass, R was totally the best movie).

Then I moved on to Macross 7, did all 49 episodes of that plus the movie, and then I merged with Parasite Anime to form Fumei Anime, whose site is still up albeit woefully out of date. You'll see my name on there as well.
For Fumei I started out doing encodes of other shows, and I began using DivX3 when it was all brand new. Everyone was saying that it was all illegal and I shouldn't be using it but the thing was GREAT. If you find any encodes of Tenshi ni Narumon in DivX3, those were all Fumei Anime done by me, same with all the Hana Yori Dango encodes and a bunch of other random stuff which I encoded for Fumei like the first Detective Conan movie and the Gekiganger 3 OVA. But then the tape fansub scene just dried up in the face of digisubbing, and I began squirming my way into that community later on (as DrasticMouse, for those who don't know, I did a bunch of HQA, AI, and all of ANBU's early stuff).

So there's my brief history of anime encoding. As you can see, I've been doing this a DAMN long time - I was here for the beginning of anime fansubs online. That's one of the reasons I'm so damn knowledgable about video encoding, cause I've been DOING it forever.

So if you look at those old encodes and cringe: fear not, I do as well. But you know what? They were DAMN good five years ago.

Ahh nostalgia.

And thanks to Tim for pointing me to this thread.

Kamoc · Post by **Kamoc** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 3:06 am

stop making fun of illiterates.

Tab. · Post by **Tab.** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 8:42 am

ha, you used RM :P

Tab. · Post by **Tab.** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 9:15 am

btw, the guy who did the rest of the episodes on these CDs (the ones you didn't do) was ahead of his time. He downloaded rt subs from some usenet group and used smil files to link the raw a/v with the subs. He used fucking 8 kbps audio though :\

soft subs = roxxor

Summanaro · Post by **Summanaro** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 2:55 pm

Oh yeah, like I really understood anything of what ErMaC said =/... ><..... my head hurts from trying to read it... not good for when you first wake up...........

Roke · Post by **Roke** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 3:49 pm

What the hell are your problems? He was just explaining his love for Sailor Moon.

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 4:08 pm

ErMaC's post is fine. I perfectly understand what he means and sympathise with what he says... after all, for me - just a few short years ago, downloading anime off internet was a shockingly impossible idea. And at that time, I would kill to get those RM encodes. Sadly, now with all the access in the world, I can't seem to regain the interest that I used to have in Sailormoon as a series.

Kamoc · Post by **Kamoc** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 4:52 pm

it's probably that goatee. you lady-killer, you.

flammie · Post by **flammie** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 6:50 pm

Ermac, Kokoro Library was awesome. Thanks for encoding it

ErMaC · Post by **ErMaC** » Fri Aug 08, 2003 11:32 pm

Ahh!!! Someone else who watched Kokosho! wai~wai~

That show was a kind of labor of love for all of ANBU. It was the first show we all did together that no one else was doing - the kind of obscure show that used to symbolize what ANBU was about - stuff that no one else would do but was still appreciated by some people.

Kokosho was a great learning experience too, throughout the series I got better and better with Nandub, and it shows as the filesizes get progressively smaller in successive episodes (for the most part). I also did lots of experimenting with the VDub Logo filter and stuff to add the titles in the opening and the episode title.

I now also own all the Manga for it. It's so pretty! I highly recommend it for people who appreciate good art. The mangaka is INSANE. More than half of every volume is full color

And it's just gorgeous.

Anyways - you're welcome flammie, I hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoyed encoding it.