1 "(And I can hear the shrieks of the Kanon fans from here.)"

Oh, hell no. They. Did. Not. Just. Cancel. That.

2 I don't care about Kanon, but G-L is a SRS BSNS. They better not screw the pooch on that one.

3 There's speculation, based on some website clues, that it might be server glitch.  I don't believe so; they'd have said something by now.  More significant, I believe, was the refusal to give permission to that college club to broadcast Utawarerumono. That carried a strong hit of "We can't because we don't own the rights."

4

I think those people on that bulletin board are just whistling in the grave yard. They're trying to find the most positive spin they can, but none of them know anything.

Myself, I'm not at all optimistic. I'm expecting a worst-case event very soon.

5 When I first saw this, I looked at ADV's site and said okay, they've lost the database and reverted to an old backup.  No way they've lost their licenses for everything they've bought in the last three years.

But every hour that passes without comment makes that less plausible.

6 Yep, I'd say the old database/website reversion is the result, not the cause.  They're probably in desperate, 11th-hour negotiations with banks or a white knight, and thus the lack of comment.

7 Of all the possibilities, Sojitz walking is sounding increasingly like the most plausible - I'd guess all the cutbacks we've heard in the last week have been ADV looking to make themselves appear more attractive, or at least show that they are moving towards increased profitability. Presumably it hasn't worked and their Japanese backers have decided to pull out, resulting in the loss of licenses as a result.

I certainly hope that isn't the case - I've got a bunch of vol. 1s from the titles it looks like are being pulled already - but I'm getting more pessimistic with every day there's no comment on the matter. Of small consolation is the fact that I've picked up the entirety of the craptacular Xenosaga already...

8 Well... of that list GL, Kanon, and XS were on my buy list. The first two because I really wanted them, and the last by obligation (I've been a Xeno-phile since the first RPG game in 1998).

9 I'm not a G-L fan but I know a few folks who are, and I was rather looking forward to an eventual box of Kanon. Let alone an R1 copy of 5cm/sec. (Hey, I have the other Shinko DVDs, why not?)

Damn. Then again, there are some hot properties in there. Somebody will pick a couple of them up, right?

Right?

10

Kanon was both obligation and want, TTGL was want.

A bitter irony if fans are forced to watch fansubs because of too much fansubbing...

11 Shinkai. Not Shinko. This is why I shouldn't comment while suffering low blood sugar.

Sorry about that.

12 The site did switch to a new format in the last day or two (it wouldn't completely load at all for me yesterday).  However, the fact that their newest releases are still missing, while their older stuff appears just fine, is a cause for concern to me.  The new titles don't even appear in the web site search function, and I know they had posts about them on the site before...

13 The plot thickens - ICV2 apparently posted up an article about ADV cancelling some 37 titles a couple of days ago, only to pull it a shortly afterwards. Exactly what I said I have no idea - try googling "ICV2 ADV Cancels 37 Titles" and you'll it in the results, though. Some people have reported success in getting the cached article, so if you are lucky that may shed more light.

14 No luck getting the cached article, but I notice that article #11989, which used to be about just that (according to a link at Wednesdays Haul) is now an exact copy of article #11987, as if it were cut and pasted to replace it.

So we now have not only worrisome rumors and official silence, we have censored articles -- the kind of thing that screams "cease and desist order!"

I think that pretty much seals it.

15 Sorry for the bad grammar in that last comment - it's getting late over here (or that's the excuse I'm using, anyway).

Anyway, at least part of that articles text is on the AoD forums now, and to quote the most significant sounding part "ADV has suspended certain elements of its former alliance with ARM Corporation, which financed the acquisition of these titles.  ADV is working closely with various constituencies with the goal of restoring most if not all of these properties to our release schedule at a later date to the extent possible."

Sounds bad (there's a longer list of catalogue titles on there than in the ANN article), though one wonders why ICV2 pulled the piece.

16 Update: someone at ANN posted a cached copy.  Due to the length, I'm posting it at Bridgebunnies.

17 Oh my stars and garters.  To say that this is bad news is something of an understatement.

Oh, and Kanon being cancelled?  AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

(I know y'all were expecting it)

18 That vanished story does provide the missing puzzle piece - why did all these shows disappear at once?  If the deal with a studio fell through for some reason, only the shows from that studio would be lost.

Answer: All the eggs were in one basket, and they dropped the basket.

19

There are a lot of studios in Japan, and most of them are pretty small in absolute terms. We fans see them loom large, but we're talking about companies which may have 25 permanent employees who are not directly involved in creating animation.

It isn't reasonable for every single company like that to negotiate separately with R1 release companies. So it's hardly a surprise to learn that there are middle-men. I would expect there to be an agency which represents anything up to 10 such studios at once, who would take care of negotiations and licensing with R1 release companies, probably for a percentage.

Everything we see now says "cash flow problem". If ADV has been missing royalty payments, then the Japanese licensing agency may have pulled the plug on them, and in that case ADV would be legally obligated to scrub their business clean of every title involved in the Japanese agency's C&D. That's what I think happened.

It doesn't necessarily mean that those titles will never see R1 release. First, ADV could find some cash somewhere (any of several possibilities) and get itself out of arrears, which would restore their license rights. Second, if ADV craters, then the rights would revert and the agency could try to sell them to someone else.

Unfortunately, my gut feeling right now is that both of those are low probability. I think that the highest probability scenario is that ADV will close its doors very soon, i.e. days, and that the majority of those titles won't find any new home in R1.

The ones most likely to find new homes are, of course, those which are most popular with fans. The Wallflower won't find a buyer, but Kanon and Gurren Lagann are more likely to.

Or maybe not. It also depends on whether the licensing agency has an unreasonable expectation for how valuable those licenses are. You could see exactly the opposite: the crap titles get picked up, the top drawer stuff languishes, just because of price.

If ADV does crash and burn, which is what I expect, then the odds are that most of those titles will never see R1 light-of-day. And maybe none of them.

20 Looking at the list of series on hiatus that ubu posted on his site and I am pissed. How could Kurau: Phantom Memory be on there, they licensed that show 3 1/2 years ago. Only one disc to go in that series too, it's supposed to be release in two weeks. Keeping my fingers crossed that it's already been shipped to retailers and won't be recalled.

21

Doyen, don't give up hope!  My pre-order of Kurau volume 6 arrived today, even though it's supposedly not going to be released for two more weeks.  Of course, if they couldn't pay rent on the warehouse, and had to empty it quick...

22

The current anime crash is really sad.  I know a lot of fans don't give a shit because they are fansub watchers, but I'm bummed, because I tried to watch some and found I just hate sitting in front of my computer for hours watching anime.  Converting downloads to DVD shows the inherently low image quality (there is no cheating the gods of data rate) and look pretty bad (sub VHS) on my home theater plasma.  Yeah, I can rent and copy disks in Japan on my trips, but you still lose a lot of quality, since you're compressing a double-layer disk to single layer.  I guess all we can hope for is that things bounce back at least a bit after the crash and some of the series in great demand still make it.  A more realistic stance by the Japanese side would help a lot.  If they go back to looking at R1 as a bonus bit of cash flow (as, for example, I did when licensing my manga to Europe) instead of being relied on, that would help.  $70k for each episode of Heat Guy J?  I just about plotzed.  However, the R1 reimportation issue remains a serious problem.  I wonder if sub-only releases might be more attractive under the "it's all bonus money" approach?  It seems to me that while DVDs can produce subtitles as separate data streams that can be excised using video tools, if you're doing a sub-only surely there is a way of mastering that would essentially burn them into the picture data.

Avatar...?

23

It would be really easy to include the subtitles in the video stream. They'd use exactly the same tools the fansubbers use.

There is a section early in Martian Successor Nadesico which has subtitles burned into the video. (The Captain is speaking English, and they subtitled it in Japanese.)

But I think that would not be very popular with R1 fans. I know I wouldn't like it at all.

24

It seems to me that while DVDs can produce subtitles as separate data streams that can be excised using video tools, if you're doing a sub-only surely there is a way of mastering that would essentially burn them into the picture data.

Sure, as Steven says, you'd just encode them right into the video stream. That would allow you to do higher-quality subtitles too. DVD subtitle support is really primitive by today's standards, which is why I still watch the fansubs even after I've bought the DVD.

Only downside for me is that then it's hard to get nice clean frame grabs for blog posts (and the same applies in spades for AMV creators). But there's always the raws for that.

On the subject of video quality, most of the fansubs I see these days (as opposed to 2002 or '03) are very good - sharp, clear and vibrant - except for certain specific artifacts, the most common and obvious one being banding in colour gradients. Definitely not DVD quality, but much better than VHS overall.

25 Steven, that was done once upon a time, but people complained and complained and complained, so now you don't see it anymore. ;p

I don't know anything solid, but it's not "zomg chapter 11" time. My contacts are too chipper for things to be entirely dire...

26

My contacts are too chipper for things to be entirely dire...

I sure hope you're right.

27

I'm not saying burning the subtitles is an ideal solution, just that as a way of persuading Japanese licensors concerned about R1 sales biting into R2 sales, it could be effective.  I mean, really: are clean screen caps more important than actually getting the anime?

I sure wouldn't mind nice crisp subtitles with italics and such, either.

As for the quality issue, Pixy, I mean that when I tried transcoding the fansubs and burning them to DVD to watch on my home theater, the results sucked like an Electrolux.  Maybe the Nero transcoding program is just not very good even at the highest quality settings...I dunno.

Avatar, I sure hope what were seeing is a shakeout, not a permanent crash.  Look at what happened to American comics in the 90s...they ended up at about 10% of their peak and have never recovered.  Maybe Geneon simply could not overcome their Japanese-style overhead, and leaner, meaner companies will survive.  But hasn't ADV already been through that "trimming" phase?  It's troubling....

This following suggestion ought to raise a few hackles...heh, heh.  Since fansubs are unstoppable, why not, as a company, simply license a product sub-only, pick the best fansub out there, and use that?  What are the fansubbers going to do?  Complain that you "ripped them off"...?  (Ahh, schadenfreunde.)  It would save some money, anyway.  Enough to matter, I don't know--I suspect anime translators are paid peanuts.  They must be, considering how lame a lot of them are.  It grates on me to admit this, but when I was checking out fansubs, I found more than a few that were better than the official DVD versions.

28 It's not uncommon that those who do something for love do a better job of it than those who do it for money.

29 For translation quality, the real kicker is that most companies don't have someone with a good grounding in both languages, who can tell the difference between a good translation and a lousy one. But even then, I mean, you don't have to be a genius to know that if your translation is in completely broken, nonsensical English, it's probably pretty bad. (Though it does help...)

I gather that it's not a really big deal to the companies involved, though. Complaints about translation accuracy vary directly with the popularity of the show, and not at all with the actual quality of the translation. I saw more complaints about Azumanga (exhaustively, painstakingly done by quite possibly the best translator in anime) than Neo Ranga (of which my opinion is not printable on Steven's blog, or even mine!)

That said, translation cost is not all that much. I mean, they get paid better than I do, and it's pretty good by the hour, but it's not that much in absolute terms or anything.

Actually taking a fansub translation without permission is a really bad idea, though. The reason a company can't go around suing fansubbers is because the latter are generally broke; they have no assets worth seizing. This is emphatically not true the other way around! Schadenfreude aside, bucking a lawsuit to save a few bucks is not a good business practice.

30

As for the quality issue, Pixy, I mean that when I tried transcoding the fansubs and burning them to DVD to watch on my home theater, the results sucked like an Electrolux.

Yeah, that definitely shouldn't happen, so it's probably the transcoding thingy at fault. I just plug my notebook into my TV using a VGA cable. The big screen does make the compression artifacts more noticeable, but its still very watchable.

Look at what happened to American comics in the 90s...they ended up at about 10% of their peak and have never recovered.

I don't think its directly comparable (at least I hope not!) There's plenty of anime that appeals to newcomers, whether they're looking for an action show or a comedy or whatever.

31

Toren: ...are clean screen caps more important than actually getting the anime?

As long as they don't hire any of the current crop of fansub "typesetters" who fill the screen with gaudy animated crap, it wouldn't be fatal, but the better the anime, the less I'd like it. My Japanese isn't good enough to do without subs most of the time, but if the art is any good, I at least want the option of being able to see it all.

I've seen fansubbers that run text across the top, bottom, and both sides of the screen (particularly during songs), and even completely cover it for a few seconds with a long-winded explanation of something that's just not that important. For instance, someone recently posted a screencap of R+V that included details about the novelists that the cat-monster teacher was lecturing about.

Yes, it's mildly amusing that she only lectures about cat books, and it's a joke the Japanese audience would get. Is it important enough to cover the screen? No. Could it have been explained in less detail? Yes: "(her lecture's about cat books)".

-j

32

I've seen fansubbers that run text across the top, bottom, and both sides of the screen (particularly during songs)

I don't mind that in the opening and closing credits, and it's easy to toss in clean copies of the OP/ED as extras on an otherwise hard-subbed DVD release.  I know I've seen some that used all four sides exactly as you say, but I can't think what it was all for - Romaji karaoke titles, English translation, kana, and... something.

Some of the opening credits efforts by fansubbers are quite impressive, actually.  But yeah, once you're past the credits, simple, clean, anti-aliased text is all I want.

33

Avatar, after 20+years in the business and multiple lawsuits, I know copyright law on translations.  I can say without hesitation anyone suing a company for "ripping off" a translation they had no right to make in the first place has nothing in the law to stand on.  Nothing.  The right to produce a derivative work is held by the licensor and contractually given to the licensee.  It would be a losing proposition for anyone who tried such a suit, and even a bottom feeder lawyer who works contingency wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole if they had a rat's ass worth of sense.  Now, if the fan subbers decided to scrape together their lunch money and pay for a suit up front, then, yeah, they could file it.  Anyone can sue anyone for anything in America.  But it's freakin' expensive (entry level on copyright suits runs $30,000 and up) and I can't see the fansubbers having the bucks to blow.  And it would be a complete waste of time--they would lose.  Plus, they would have to come out in the open to file a suit, which would make it possible to countersue real people and not untrackable internet ghosts, and you don't always sue for money.  Sometimes you do it to send a message, pour encourager les autres.

The sometimes inexplicable likes and dislikes of the otaku for certain translations is a mystery.  In the manga biz, it was just the same.  Some awesome translations would be absolutely hated, and some stiff, lame ones would get jizzed over.  Nodame Cantabile has been singled out for much praise, and IMHO, it reads like a roll of toilet paper.  Go figure.  (It's a source of amusement to me that one of the few translations Studio Proteus did that never got criticized by the fans was Ghost in the Shell.  My take on that is that there were essentially no fans who could understand the original, so they kept quiet...rather than with books like OMG, where every Japanese 101 student thinks they get it and can do it better.)

Translation quality...well, ideally you would expect a pro to be hand-picked for skill.  Certainly that's the way I ran my business.  But, qua Steven, I did it for love AND money.  (Still, perhaps it's illuminating that I'm out of the business.)  And I place as much blame on the editors, too, who should have the skills and the responsibility to polish inadequate translations.  But again, poor pay and slave labor conditions requiring massive output are not exactly conducive to quality. 

Pixy: Yeah, I dragged my computer upstairs and tried a VGA connection, which looked much better, but it's a hassle.  Maybe a dedicated laptop hooked up as a sort of "computer file VCR" would be the way to go but I'm still extremely uncomfortable with fansubs (in case no one has noticed, har har). 

J: Amen on the busy screen problems.  Even some of the pro stuff (eg. AnimEigo, bless their fanboy hearts) is horrible cluttered, and I don't like it much either.  Liner notes are the place for that if it can't be fixed in the translation.  If you're a sub-only hardcore otaku, you should be able to catch most of that stuff anyway.

34 Pixy: if I remember correctly, the one I'm thinking of had romaji on the top, English on the bottom, kanji on the right, and kana on the left. All four of them were colorfully animated to sync with the lyrics, which was spectacularly pointless with the English version.

And to your wish for "simple, clean, anti-aliased text", let me add mine for one goddamn color only.

-j

35

I assume you mean one color scheme only?  The innovation of outlining the letters came from the fansubbing community, and I have to say, it's definitely easier to read.  Nothing is stupider than mono-color white subs on a white background.

And while four subtitle streams is two too many, I don't agree about the custom subs.  Yes, some of the lyric subs are a little overdone.  Some of the notes are too extraneous and appear/disappear too quickly.  But I actually prefer a font that matches the show, as opposed to the generic "yellow blobs."   It's actually jarring now to load up a DVD and see the same old sterile lettering across the bottom of the screen. I'm also impressed by the subbers' ability to quickly create or adapt a font to match the show's title; often I can't tell if the English title of a show is original or added by the subbers.

I find that, as long as the font is readable, this actually helps the show's immersion.  That's not to say that some groups don't manage serious overkill and become a net negative, but overall, I prefer the fansub subtitling to the professional DVD titling.

36

Careful about topic drift, please.

37 Ubu: One color for the actual words, yes. Outlining them for contrast wasn't something invented by fansubbers, it just wasn't allowed for in the DVD spec, which was written for players with less CPU power than my cellphone.

As for fonts, 9 times out of 10, something that "matches the show" would be barely legible on standard-definition television sets; you just can't do that. Many of the fansub screencaps I've seen had remarkably poor ("cool") font choices, and those were often the same clowns who did things like match a girl's words to the color of her hair.

For hard subs, two streams is almost always too many. It's a visual medium, so leave the pretty pictures alone whenever possible, please. For songs, I much prefer the usual DVD convention of alternately using the English and romaji on different episodes.

Realistically, if fansubbers were primarily motivated by the desire to share anime with an audience that doesn't speak Japanese, they'd just release timed soft-sub files that could be played with the raw. Instead, they go to a great deal of effort to re-compress compressed video that's been tagged with their group logo and handles. Softsubs would mean less bandwidth, less duplication of effort, less delay, lower barrier to entry, and the ability to actually correct poor translations.

It would also destroy the illusion that they're doing something other than just copying someone else's copyrighted work, but their ethical position wasn't particularly strong to begin with. "Stop when it's licensed" is really just "stop when someone in my country is able to sue". -j

38

Matroska containers have the option of deactivating the included soft-subs, so if you just want to watch the HD raw, you can still do that. And I don't mind so much the muti-colored subs. The colored fansubs in Sketchbook are color coordinated to match the characters' hair color and are very helpful in some scenes where we get a closeup of one character while several others are talking off-screen.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Is it possible ADV's upbeat office tone is a sign that the really money problem is with the sponsor in Japan?

39 Sorry about topic drift, but there's really not much more to say on the topic. "Await developments"...

If I didn't have to worry about the DVD spec and the display properties of NTSC televisions, my subs would look spiffier too, I'm sure. ;p

As far as copyright lawsuits, of course they're expensive to file (this is why the anime companies can't afford to sue, after all.) But they're also expensive to defend, and both of 'em are way more expensive than just paying for a (hopefully competent) translation.

Toren, you can hand-pick translators for skill because you can tell skill from lack of skill. But that's a fairly unusual trait, and one not generally represented among the anime companies' personnel who ride herd on their translators. (And implementing it is rough in its own way - mediocre translators who thought they were pretty good, when they get page after page of corrections, take a pretty massive morale hit.) Since the market doesn't really reward good translation over bad, and because the supply of good translators is so, so limited, they don't really try too hard for that...

40 Translation skill is really difficult for someone who doesn't also speak the language to evaluate (except in extreme story-breaking cases like replacing "four years ago" with "when I was four years old"). A good example is Henderson's "An Introduction to Haiku"; the top review on Amazon is almost fellating in its praise for his translations.

They're not uniformly awful, but the book is filled with poor word choices ("koe" translated as "sound", and "monogatari" as "conversation", for instance). He makes them rhyme. In his defense, the book is 50 years old, and he admits up-front that some of his choices are controversial, but he was struggling to introduce an unfamiliar art form. The fact that the book is still in print shows that his effort wasn't wasted.

My Japanese Culture teacher, herself a professional poetry translator with decades of experience, uses this book as a text. She's open about its flaws, but it also includes decent historical and biographical notes, as well as context and romaji for all the haiku. And however you feel about the translation, the selection is solid.

-j

41 I'm going to close this thread now.