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Fansub Typeset Styling 101 Fansub Typeset Styling 101 by getfresh OverviewStyling the main typeset for a series is the most important part of a typesetter's job. The reason it is the most important is due to the fact that it will be the most consistently seen part of the over all typeset and because it must be absolutely legible to the viewer. Readability and minimal intrusion are the keys to decent fansub styling. Part 1: Font Selection / Genre ClassificationWhen selecting a font the very first thing you must do is watch the anime. When first starting out as a styler, it is best to watch the full episode. This allows you to build a solid “feeling” towards the anime and gain a total concept of what genre it is. Once you are more experienced at genre classifying a series you won’t have to watch nearly as much of it. For example, I only skim through the episode in vdub while stopping to examine scenes that dominate the over all length of the episode. Once you have an idea of what the anime is about (comedy, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, moe, hentai, children’s, ecchi, etc…), you should begin looking through your fonts to find ones that fit the “feel” of that genre. Make a list of the names of the fonts you liked and create styles in your ssa/ass script for each one. For now you are done selecting your fonts. Part 2: Sizing FontsWhen sizing a font you will need to be able to see it rendered on the actual video. Even though there are programs that can load the video and typesets like aegisub, I do not recommend it. I’m not knocking the ability of this program to be useful, it is mainly due to the fact that you will need to encode snippets of your rendered typesets. You will need to encode these snippets because when the typesets are encoded, the colors will change slightly as will the borders and sharpness. In most cases, they become darker and more blurred. Moving right along, load your video file and your script with the styles into VirtualDub. Make sure you have generic dialogue lines already created and timed to the length of the whole episode. Timing to the whole length just makes your life easier. When making generic lines make them as long as a 2-liner would be in an anime with the same aspect ratio. Now place “;” in from of all dialogue lines except the first one you wish to work on. With all the finished we can begin sizing. To size you need to consider 3 things, readability, line wrapping, and screen coverage. Try get them to the most readable size that wraps into a maximum 2 lines of text on screen at any time, while not taking up more than the bottom 1/5 or 1/4 of the overall video. Those are generic ratios of the most extreme sizes you should ever use. Remember, smaller is better when it comes to viewable area. During this time you should also add bolding to “thinner” fonts, and border+shadow because they affect scale readability and coverage as well. When doing borders and shadows you should use 0.5 amounts because they just render better, i.e. 1.5, 2.5, etc… Make sure that the border size fits the fonts “thickness” and don’t go crazy with the shadowing. Shadows should be as unobtrusive as possible only adding to the over all characteristics not becoming one of its own. We are done with sizing now. Part 3: Color SetsIn the first part of this step you must decide just what kind of styles you will have. Some common types are main, collision, thoughts, flashbacks, on-screen, off-screen, radio/TV/phone/speaker, narrator. However many you have will determine how many color sets you will need to make. To pick your color you will need a hex color grabber. I personally like ColorMania. Open your color grabber and scroll throughout the episode stopping at areas that have colors which are present throughout the episode. Grab these colors one by one and before copying the hex lighten up the colors till they are very faint. These lighten up colors will be your primary colors. A primary should only hint at the color you wanted since colors with sum and blend once encoded anyways. Next you will select your border and shadow colors. For borders/shadows there are 2 styles of doing them. First is the highest readability factor in which is everything just black giving highest contrast. Second is using colors that compliment the primary color. When you pick the secondary colors make them as dark as possible while still maintaining their characteristics. This is so they do not blend into the primary to heavily, as well don’t make the text blend into the animation to heavily. Consider it a caveat to avoid neon-coloured or any other subtitles whose colors are incompatible with the theme of the anime. Make quite a few different color sets you like. Next encode these clips of your style selections over 3 or 4 key sections of the episode. Watch your encodes and start narrowing down which sets you truly liked and assign them to which styles they will be used for. Part 4: Font Preview VideosNow that you have your styling done as far as colors and size are concerned can do your final selection procedures. Make candidate videos of style sets for every font you liked. Span these videos over the 3 or 4 key scenes you liked, each font gets its own video. Watch each video and delete the most unreadable or disliked ones. Now if you still have remaining videos you should name each one differently and upload them to your work ftp to let the other staffers on the project help out a bit. You should always get a general consensus from the project team since they will be watching the release as well and should not have to put up with styles they detest. Once all have agreed you are done and are thus free to return to watching porn, playing h-games or whatever >.>
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