Today I saw some young foolish man bump an asuki thread from 2007 because he wanted to watch some youtube tutorials about encoding that had since been set as private. In a flash of insight I realized just how dumb that is.
Here’s the tl;dr: you probably shouldn’t be encoding. There’s no reason for you to do so. It probably makes your fansub take more time to finish and the end result is probably less than optimal. Also, you probably shouldn’t be getting into fansubbing.
Reasoning
- You probably don’t have your own ts capper. Which means that if you want a ts you’re going to have to wait a few days for it to pop up on pd/share, if it pops up at all; and if it doesn’t, you’re going to reencode a reencode, and that is just dumb.
- You shouldn’t be hardsubbing. Seriously, don’t do it. It’s considered harmful.
- Learning how to encode properly (as in, with correct VFR, treating interlaced shit correctly, handling earthquake overlays, etc etc etc) takes literally years. It’s not something you pick up in a week by watching Youtube tutorials; it requires an actual learning effort and proper understanding of how the heck digital video actually works. If you encode anyway, there’s a huge chance you’ll screw a good deal of your releases up. Some of these screwups will be noticeable to some of your viewers; others might just make other encoders laugh at you, but in both cases it’s embarrassing, and you don’t want to be embarrassed on the internet, do you?
What you should do
Download a random raw that doesn’t look terrible. Mux in your script with mkvmerge. Release. If someone complains about video quality, tell them to blame Japan.
Comments (10)
aw~ shit~!
What do you do if you can only find raws for a show in .wmv and you don’t want to release 330~350 MB files for 24 minute videos in 640×480?
@2: wait for the blurays
fuck anime
What if I want to learn how to encode because I just want something to do that actually make me put some :effort: on it?
Well, I’ll start reading up the x264 documentation and some ivtc shit that some dude on the irc was talking about.
thank you. i don’t deal with encoding at all but i’ve always wondered why anyone would reencode a shareraw rather than just muxing a script in. that’s like transcoding a 320 cbr mp3 to v0 vbr.
@fluff
In the specific direction your post was geared i agree, but…
IMO don’t generally discourage learning to encode :)
@whoever wants to learn to encode
Just maybe start with encoding progressive frame blureis. Make the encoder suffer, sometimes encode bitrate starved. Don’t release this practicing material (unless labeled as such;).Only once you have a decent grasp of how the various ways the encoder compromises on quality, go on to stuff needing *any* filtering.
PS i don’t claim to be a good encoder. I find encoding fun, but use it almost exclusively for personal/other stuff (i.e. not “releases”)
Good post. agree with everything you said, but i think those embarrassed encodes will make him/her learn how to overcome the mistakes. if he/she take it seriously.
lol @ srsly
>treating interlaced shit correctly
I don’t think I’m ever gonna figure this out. Shit is confusing.