Becoming a Fansubber

A while back, I saw an ad tacked onto a fansubbed episode of Pandora Hearts saying that they were looking for a translator for the project. Naturally I jumped at the chance, and sent over an email. To make a long story short, they eventually quit the project and I went looking to see if anyone had translated the manga, or possibly even had the raws of it up to read. I found a scanlation group which was working on it and jumped in with both feet.

But they wouldn't let me translate. Apparently one of their long-term translators had earmarked the project, and was working on it a little behind the cleaners. I volunteered as a cleaner and whipped through a few chapters, but I still really wanted to translate - more than just reading it aloud on the fly for my SO. I tried typing my translations directly onto the cleaned raws for him, but it took forever and just wasn't the same.

Then yesterday I finally got fed up with fansubbing groups dropping the project and making me search for another group's releases. Also most of them take nearly a week to release an episode, which is frustrating because I can watch and understand it, but I can't share it with anybody else. So...I've decided to try my hand at fansubbing.

Last night I spent a couple hours translating episode 8 with my headphones on so I wouldn't bother anyone. I got about halfway done with it when another search finally pulled up a new group's release of the episode, but I decided to take what I had and see if I could turn it into subtitles.

I found a sweet program called Aegisub, which lets me create subtitle files. I wasn't really certain what I was supposed to do with the sub file, at first. Sure I could send it off to some current fansubbing group, but they'd most likely have their own translator and I didn't want to step on toes there like I had at MangaAbyss. On the other hand, the only search results I could find for encoding looked like a nightmare - 7 or 8 programs, just to put the subtitles on? That couldn't be what I was looking for.

Finally I found the right search keywords. A program called Virtual Dub with a couple of plug-ins turned my nice raw anime episode into a shiny brand new (half-)subtitled .avi file! Woohoo! As soon as episode 9 airs on Thursday, it's go time! (P.S.: Don't tell my husband. It's a surprise!)

Edit: Virtual dub hashed my karaoke. AVI ReComp is better, but still isn't displaying properly.