I'm talking about speedsubs as something distinct from rips of professional simulcasts; I don't consider those fansubs at all.
Real fansub groups used to compete to be the first to release their translations, so you wouldn't have translation checks or as many editing passes.
Nowadays, the simulcasts (and the rips thereof) are faster than any speedsub could possibly be, so the remaining fansubbers definitely put more effort into quality.
> Back in the 4:3 days when anime was vbr and sources were interlaced fansub groups would go through frame by frame doing pulldown and denoising. It was amazing.
You don't need to do denoising and deinterlacing these days, so... I'm not sure why you think things were better back then? Nowadays encoders are more concerned about banding in particular, so they may specifically add noise on a scene-by-scene basis.
> When's the last time you've seen high quality karaoke on fansubs?
If you get actual fansubs these days instead of simulcast rips, you'll find they have high quality karaoke. I particularly remember the Railgun S karaoke which had realistic-looking lightning striking each syllable. And more recently, you may find the English translations have been worded so that you can sing along in time with the original song.
> You don't often see translation notes any more either.
If you're talking about TL notes in the subtitles themselves, they really went out of style. Nobody wants to be the next "Translator's note: keikaku means plan".
> If you get actual fansubs these days instead of simulcast rips, you'll find they have high quality karaoke. I particularly remember the Railgun S karaoke which had realistic-looking lightning striking each syllable. And more recently, you may find the English translations have been worded so that you can sing along in time with the original song.
I think we're a bit late to be calling Railgun S "these days" these days...
I see. I never downloaded these speedsubs nor knew they existed, because I had a choice. I could download high quality content, which I did. Back then I was never forced into crappy subs.
Today options are limited for many different anime, where you get one or more choices and all of them are just okay, not keeping up with the standard a decade+ ago.
At least professional subs today are better than fansubs in the 80s and early to mid 90s.
Well, back then you mostly just wouldn't have heard much at all about most of the kinds of shows which just get an official sub and no fansubber attention.
Venture into the realm of even slightly obscure and you generally have ... zero to one choices of script translation, usually. To this day, even.
Real fansub groups used to compete to be the first to release their translations, so you wouldn't have translation checks or as many editing passes.
Nowadays, the simulcasts (and the rips thereof) are faster than any speedsub could possibly be, so the remaining fansubbers definitely put more effort into quality.
> Back in the 4:3 days when anime was vbr and sources were interlaced fansub groups would go through frame by frame doing pulldown and denoising. It was amazing.
You don't need to do denoising and deinterlacing these days, so... I'm not sure why you think things were better back then? Nowadays encoders are more concerned about banding in particular, so they may specifically add noise on a scene-by-scene basis.
> When's the last time you've seen high quality karaoke on fansubs?
If you get actual fansubs these days instead of simulcast rips, you'll find they have high quality karaoke. I particularly remember the Railgun S karaoke which had realistic-looking lightning striking each syllable. And more recently, you may find the English translations have been worded so that you can sing along in time with the original song.
> You don't often see translation notes any more either.
If you're talking about TL notes in the subtitles themselves, they really went out of style. Nobody wants to be the next "Translator's note: keikaku means plan".