Fansubs

[Irish]

Greetings all...for those of you who don't know me on irc...I'm very inolved in fansubs...I have a question as regards possible re-authoring (without re-encoding) region2 dvds...As most of you know...anime is usually not easy at all to encode well...what I am wondering is, if I have a region2 dvd which is less than 4.3gb...and the corresponding ssa file timed to an avi raw which is 23.97...is there a method for incorporating the subs into the vobs without taking it apart completely by tweaking the ifo file or by loading the dvds assets into dvdmaestro or scenarist and recompiling the assets?
thanks
Irish

[Irish]

I showered AND used deoderant...really! :)

[Nogami]

You'll need to demux the vobs from the original DVD, then drop the tracks onto the timeline in Maestro or the like and add the subtitles in afterwards. This is reasonably easy to do.

If the original subtitles are timed at ~24fps, you'll also need to resync them to the DVD, which probably means dropping a .wav reference file out of the audio, loading the script into SSA and doing a bunch of ramping & tweaking.

I've been slowly working on the Patlabor DVD imports, and while it looks great and is reasonably easy to do, it's pretty labour intensive (although much of that time is due to the exactness of re-timing that I like).

N.

[Irish]

If it is just a matter of making an 8 bit mono wav and retiming, it isn't a big deal...I'm guess original menus still work and subtitle button on the remote will turn english subs on and off?

[maven]

the problem is (most likely - i've never touched dvd authoring before) that the dvd-authoring app will not be able to read .ssa files.
one solution might be (and it shouldn't be too difficult really) to use the source to vdub's subtitles filter to output 4bit rle graphics files which you can then mux into the video-stream...

but what for?

[Nogami]

That's what MaestroSBT is for. It reads SSA files and outputs complete Maestro-compatible subtitle files. And it does a GREAT job of it!