The Age of Fansubbers and Money
There’s been a lot of hubbub lately about scanlating and moneymaking. Here’s a post from us regarding the other side of the anime/manga fandom.
Now before continuing, here’s a disclaimer. Is this post going to be biased?
Oh hell yes.
Here’s the thing;
Watermarks are retarded
Does Commie use watermarks? No. Not even a logo of the group plastered all over the title scene, which some notable groups love to do.
Do you see this shit? Do you know how fucking annoying that is?
Why do scanlation groups do retarded things like the above? The answer is Money, which will be covered a bit later. For now, more ranting about how incredibly retarded watermarks are.
The argument scanlators have is that they want people who read manga online to know where it came from. Does it fucking matter? You’re a fucking pirate, get over yourselves.
You hear a lot about how Mangafox “steals” their work, and in response scanlators have resorted to watermarking a perfectly good release to shit.
Guess what? Anime streaming sites exist too. There are a fucking ton of them, and we at Commie don’t give a single shit about our “work” being “stolen”. We don’t even use logos. If you were to stream our release on a random site, unless the upload has [Commie] in the title, you would have no fucking idea it was from us. (Unless, of course, you recognize LT Finnegan, but that’s a separate story)
There also exists a “good” manga reading site, Batoto. Batoto actually allows scanlators to be paid for their work through ad revenue. Look around on this site. Do you see ads? No. Do you think any of the 50 million anime streaming sites listed on Google pays us? No, no they don’t.
So how does fansubbing remain alive? What motivates people to do it, if it isn’t money?
Donations. Commie has subsisted entirely on donations and Fileserve money. Now Fileserve is dead, and we will have to do with only donations just like Wikipedia. We have zero ad revenue, no other sites paying us, and absolutely no watermarks.
Now scanlators might argue:
The amount of work put into scanlating is greater than that of fansubbing.
Bullshit.
The average team of people that sees an episode from start to finish consists of at least five people, each putting in a couple of hours. That’s one episode. We do (or at least try to do) seventeen episodes a week. How, you may ask? Sheer willpower and manpower. Commie has a staff of over twenty active members, and we hope to at least double that. None of them are paid. None of them ask to be paid. They do this for the pride, for the enjoyment, and honestly, for the friends you can make while subbing cartoons. Proof? Over 70 people have applied for intern positions in the last two months. These people want to “give back” to the community, and some of them will go on to do exactly that.
A server for providing manga is more expensive than a fansubbing server.
Again, bullshit. If the guys running those things had any idea of efficient coding, a 100mbps server with a decent quad core CPU could provide for everything. Such servers are cheap, $100 at most. Incidentally, encoding the average 720p anime episode would take at least four hours on said server. Bandwidth? What about bandwidth? Commie’s server dishes out 3TB a month, and our XDCC puts out another TB on top of that. Even if you stored your goddamn pictures in uncompressed PNG at full resolution, they would each be about 2MB. You could fit 150 of those pictures in one anime episode (100 for 10bit).
In conclusion? There is no conclusion. There are “good” scanlators out there who don’t watermark their releases, but their number has been consistently dwindling. Get over yourselves.
You are complaining about people stealing your already stolen work.
Woxxy:
Compared to the [author]’s work, ours is a shitstain, only worth minor credit and a read.
If scanlating completely dies due to people protesting over not being paid for a hobby, then we fansubbers will be laughing at you (not that we’re not already). While you wage war with Mangafox we at Commie will continue providing as many series as humanly possible while training an entire generation of interns.
Long live fansubbing
Posted by RHExcelion under I'm not being sarcastic why would you think I'm being sarcastic, International Politics, Red Army Parades | Permalink
I don’t give a shit, anyway.
As long as i get it free an easy.
C’mon, it’s chinese comic.
Drop a bit and that becomes a haiku:
I don’t give a shit
As long as i get it free
It’s Chinese comics
I don’t give a shit
As long as I get it free
Refrigerator
I enjoy the pirate politics. More of this, please.
watermarks ARE ridiculous, though it’s strange that there’s no way to determine a Commie release if you take [Commie] out of the title.
>Over 70 people have applied for intern positions in the last two months.
About half of them never got to actually intern, and a fifth of the remaining became like Positron.
Amen to that.
Thanks for all your ard work in the past seasons and i hope to be enjoying it for many more seasons
You’re right Commie, that is stupid. But do you know what is worse? http://i.imgur.com/wVQEq.jpg
Sorry about that. Next episode we’ll make you your own special version:
Yeah, watermaking it like that is “fucking annoying” but he has a point. If I had to vote for the most annoying group in 2011, then I would vote for Commie. Sure, you don’t watermark, but you do too much other retarded stuff…
I’m not saying all people at Commie is like that, however there surely are some which “ruins” the otherwise fine releases… I live with it, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying…
You can (and should) download other releases then because we’re not gonna stop and we’re not going to change.
Fucking idiots.
I can live with it, that is why I’m still here. But that is irrelevant. (I’m just saying I’m not blaming everyone, as it would not be fair.)
The point is that it is retarded complaining about being annoyed at other groups actions when you are intentionally making actions which annoys people yourself.
I do realize you guys are probably not going to change, but I still hope that some of you will grow up a little. It is just such a waste otherwise…
Localization >>>> shitty watermarks. Plus Japanzai’s english is the worst thing already, no need to add trolling.
See http://tlnote.neozeed.net/
Thumbs up for commie, what about shakugan no shana F ep 15 =)
“Long live fansubbing”
Well no. Get Crunchyroll in my fucking region.
It is. It’s called Horriblesubs.
^ Vote up
For what it’s worth, I’m really thankful for all your hard work :)!
Well, money and watermarks do often go together. Fun article.
About bandwidth, depends, I don’t think there’s fansub groups that use as much bandwidth as scans groups like redhawkscans, packed with my reader. There’s groups with easily more than 2Tb bandwidth used. My group uses over five terabytes.
The point is still that spending more than 100 euro is pretty difficult, and you got that.
About time used, scanlation has high fluctuations there, be it 52 pagers or crazy edits necessary, or a simple 16 pager weekly. Scizzer as he said in a past comment, and myself, we take more than six hours just to edit chapters. Other groups can laugh at us and say that they take 2-3 hours, but we’re more… Dedicated. I don’t want to use the Q word.
You could say that with fansubbing you can’t get away from a minimum time necessary, while with scanlation you can easily get away with some speed job.
For the situation of scanlation and applicants, we’re one of the most desiderable teams around, we get hardly any applicant, nearly none of them is adapt either… And other groups are going down. While you guys seem to have some fuel, we will blame sites like mangafox for making our existence unknown. Telling us to ignore manga aggregators because fansubbers don’t NEED to blame streaming sites is like telling hungry people to stay quiet because you have food in the fridge.
Thanks for your article. Sadly, the guys we are bashing are so broken that they feel reinforced even by bad publicity…
We use 3TB because that’s our cap. This means I stop torrents 10 minutes into initial seeding, after 30-50GB uploaded. Sometimes I accidentally let it run overnight and it reaches into hundreds of gigabytes.
Fluctuations in schedule? Oh sure, here too. A couple of hours was a reasonable average, but Nisemono will take two of our best typesetters and give them each a good 10 hours of work. I use the word “Insane”.
I agree with you here too. My opinion is that if you don’t put effort into it, there’s no point in releasing it.
That’s rather sad. I’d loan you guys some publicity if I could. But in the end, the amount of downloads we get on torrents is minimal compared to the amount of views streaming services get. I think the problem here is the lack of centralized distribution for manga. If every scanlator had released a torrent of every new release to TT and NT for the past several years, I would think they’d be more of where we are today. Not that there’s much you could do for it now, but I’m just putting it out there.
No problem. The truth is that I haven’t even read manga for over half a year, but it’s always fun to express some opinions. You don’t seem to be one of the bad lot, in any case, and if there’s anything we over at Commie can help you with feel free to ask.
Roger.
I’ll look into the torrents thing. We’d just need to make an update to the readers to have some torrent function, possibly inserting it as plugin in the IRC bot.
It would probably easier to have Nyaa and TT to adapt, but the results we had is that with 80 English groups it hardly looks like something worth the effort.
My opinion is that, mangaupdates is a nice service, but it made scanlation stagnant, while pushing its ruling for no direct linking to chapter, when the readers don’t want to click five times per chapter to read. Aggregators wouldn’t be this popular if that wasn’t happening.
TT and Nyaa indeed would push it to another level, but they would need to be able to link to direct downloads and readers, since torrent is hardly needed for the small files.
It’s either us adapting, easier but slow in propagation, or the two services coming towards us, which would get the new method popular in no time.
Aaah, well, I better study more and leave disruptive plans for after the exams.
Torrents probably would only be useful for batch downloads of for example several, if not all volumes in a series. I think the risk of a single chapter torrent dying out is too great.
As for tokyotosho, because I tend to forget to check scanlators’ sites, and I anyway read the whole tt, since I follow some 17 shows this season, it is more often that I see a new red hawks’ release because somebody posted a torrent than because I checked their site. So I can verify your comments about torrents from my personal experience… Besides, people would just click on the “website” link anyway.
Oh, nice. The famous Woxxy has entered the building. Good reply. It was interesting to see both the anime and the manga side of things.
Agree with you on most points. However I think scanlating is harder since you have to translate written Japanese. I know a couple of friends who can speak Japanese. None of them knows how to read Japanese. I know there are anime signs, but these are few compared with the text in a manga.
Dude, fansubber translating from the audio (when close caption unavailable), which is much harder than translating from text. Imagine translating more than 400 lines in less than 2 hours
I assure you every one of our translators and several other staff members can read written Japanese.
good to see your feet are on the ground, commie, keep up the good work.
Someone had to say it.
RHE, you’re a faggot. But I wholeheartedly agree with your point of view in this matter.
But hey, if you wanna combat the shitty scanlators, you can always unwatermark the releases and post them in their own forum:
http://www.mediafire.com/?aqqa21ewtebc18w
This method killed 1/2 of the scanlation groups I used it against (good riddance), and made the second stop using watermarks after some weeks.
Did I morbidly offend you in some way shape form or fashion in a previous incident, because I honestly do not recall your name.
No, I don’t really feel like combating shitty scanlators . But other people might, and that does sound like a logical idea.
lol our of curiosity where did this issue arise from? sorry if this is a really nooby question
There has been a lot of drama about the removal of DDL.
What about less drama, and more actual subbing of the various delayed shows?
Yo yo commie. I have always been downloading your subs. Keep up the good work. And honestly those people ranting about their work being stolen is stupid. Seriously there are TONS of other people working on the same stuff. We do not survive solely on them.
Also it would be nice if commie could provide 8bit videos from time to time. XD My com cant support 10bit fully
>could provide 8bit videos
go away.
HA, Great Stuff as usual!
I am a pirate, and i want to be Pirate King! Give me back Megaupload and my premium account! LOL
Commie I agree with ya’ll on all points (that said, I do try to read releases on the scanlator’s sites on principle)
You guys do a great job with your subs. Thank you for everything
Good Article! I am always really appreciative of the work fansub and scanlation groups do. I also purchase legal disks, and manga when what I want is available.
Thanks for the time you guys put into this, for fans of these things!
Nice article. I don’t know about fansubbing but I am sure know about scanlating
and yes, water mark is the sign of idiocy in scanlating world. Many scanlating groups got angry of how much Mangafox earn a lot of money through their work but they never think back about the earning of mangaka. English Licensed manga publishers? FUCK them!! I hate how they bought it and withhold its release indefinitely.
Mangafox’s Moderator passing through to say: Salute, brattah. Salute.
First thing first, I/we the volunteer mods never agreed on what Jacky @ Noez le Mangafox had done. We used to have a hub for scanlators to communicate with us. Me myself, is a former QC, who being the middleman.
Soon, shit happen. The owner of Mangafox got greedy, ignoring simple request on their policy. We tried to uphold it as best as we can, but to no avail. QC got stripped from their power, the hub being mentioned got closed down.
So, the scanlators running amok on us, the volunteers. We tried explaining that, nothing more we can do about that but they won’t accept it, saying as we all are Noez’s bitches. No, we are not. Why do we stay then ? Because all of us now are taking care of the forums side of MF, the community that we’ve been in love with for years.
Me myself, has been working with scanlation groups before, 2 to be exact. I know a thing or two, but not really majoring in it. I do love these guys, all of them. But ever since the shit started, I personally doesn’t like how those scanlators are acting up. Still, there a still a lot of groups who have the same passion as you guys. They wouldn’t express it as loud as you, but they did in their own way, releasing stuffs, from fan to fan. Really, hats off for you guys, truly.
Asking your permission to link this article. I shall state it here, I don’t hate those peoples, I just hope we can go back to the times we can be good friends together, like we used, like how it should really be.
AnimeMangaGame Forever.
I don’t copyright my words. Feel free to link it wherever.
>Does Commie use watermarks? No
stopped reading
http://www.whiners.pro/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Commie-Nisemonogatari-02-0BD2EE1E.mkv_snapshot_06.04_2012.01.15_19.15.02.jpg
Fully softsubbed and added because the earlier version of that picture was on /a/
look at it, there’s at least 5 more easter eggs in there.
I was just kidding.
I haven’t downloaded a Commie release in months (primarily due to your releases being too good for my ages-old laptop to handle), but I keep the group in my RSS feed just so I can catch entries like this one.
Certainly, a bit biased, you said it yourself. But I honestly enjoy reading this sort of stuff; especially with all this SOPA stuff going around, the Megaupload situation, people are starting to care more about who they get their stuff from, how they do it, the politics of it, you could say.
Dunno that you’ve got plans for it, but another entry of the sort every so often might be pretty good, in with the releases you guys do.
(+1 people who actually read the blog entries)
Did you guys drop Rinno no Lagrange?
*Rinne
If we drop something you’ll know.
You just made me a communist.
Fuck capitalism.
*salute*
great article, thanks for keeping up the good work guys!
I love you guys. Japanzai is the worst thing that has happened with manga recently, so glad you are bringing it to attention.
Best watermarks are ISBN watermarks imo
http://www.batoto.net/read/_/79115/oz/19
I wouldn’t go into arguing which one’s tougher, scanlating or fansubbing, but your statement of having each person waste a couple hours per episode is just plain stupid.
Clicking a button and leaving your computer on overnight isn’t exactly “tough work.”
Copy scripts over isn’t exactly tough shit either.
You seem to be under the impression that all we do is encode and rip scripts.
http://tokyotosho.info/search.php?terms=commie&type=0&size_min=&size_max=&username=
Search your heart, you know it’s true. The whole page is basically CR’ed shows.
Maceart has a good point – a vast majority of your current projects are being simulcasted. So yes, the “work” you do entails ripping scripts, “sprucing them up,” and encoding. Not exactly hours and hours of work. Wasted work, I must say.
Again, you guys seem to believe scripts jump from CR video to a Commie release at the push of a button. When I say hours upon hours of work I mean hours upon hours of work. Wasted, you say? Well that’s your opinion.
Well, we at Doremi don’t believe in wasting work.
But whatever floats your boat.
You don’t believe in editing or encoding, either.
“Well, we at Doremi don’t believe in doing work.”
FTFY
CR TS vs. Commie TS
http://i.imgur.com/zuhoq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/b8gjD.jpg
What a WASTE.
There usually isn’t very much usable from CR except the original translation (and even that needs to be TLCed on occasion). The script still needs to be re-edited, re-timed and typeset (since CR basically just \an8 every sign ever). Each one of these usually takes at least a couple hours, so yes – hours and hours of work.
\an8 is the best typesetting tool ever.
Seriously now.
Is this directed at Pr0zess and his group over at Japanzai by any chance?
I’ve never even heard of the guy.
Commie confirmed for high tier.
Keep it up guys, I’ll donate when I’m not a poorfag.
$ 554.79 raised.
^If that’s accurate, after the November drive and now this, I think Commie’s doing alright.
I’ll donate when you finish Maria.
can I LOL ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MalBJuI9O5k
just sayin’.
lol. i kinda like watermark. it let me know which group did the anime. it also help me find anime series that are consistance and not various. i know some group use different wording for jpn translation. but honestly…putting watermark and blocking the actual content is retarted. either put it small and short or at the end. don’t fuk it up for the rest of us. if i wanna pay someone, i pay the people responsible for bringing such media to us.
I’ll donate when Last Exile will be out within 2 days
had to wait this week for funicast because some lines were hard to hear/understand. sasuga random other language names
You guys a great and all, but sometimes you get pretty retarded with the translations.
Thanks!
I’m actually glad most groups put their name somewhere in OPs. Sometimes the only way I’ve been able to find downloadable releases of a show was by streaming it from some random site and looking at the OP credits.
>anidb doesn’t exist
>tokyo tosho search function doesn’t exist
it is a dark, dark world indeed.
Finnally someone who talks logical. I completely agree with you RHExcelion. Why should they care if their work is being showed on mangafox/batoto or not. Its not like the sites are making money money off of it because they are providing them free and made it easier to access for everyone. They are making money from the ad revenue they are getting because of all the people showing up to read manga beacuse it is easier to access. Obviously quite a bit of the money goes to maintaining the servers because of all the manga they have.
Thank you so much. I am a scanlator and I wholeheartedly agree with you. A single watermark in an unassuming location is perfectly acceptable to me but nowadays a ton of groups want to put huge annoying watermarks on ever single page.
And by using these horrible watermarks you are becoming like the devils of (creators and promoters of SOPA, PIPA…) yourself. If you find yourself in these words and are insulted … GOOD! Because that just proves my point! The only preper place for watermarks is on paper (money).
You know, I love you guys. I hope that helped-
well for me i will tolerate watermarks depending on the reason.
A-team for example did it because they were spotted by the author of the manwha and now they are trying not to be in the spotlight again so its ok with me. and besides why would i complain when im just leeching off these pirate myself
Straight to the point. Nice one Commie. I will donate as soon as I save up a bit. :)
When manga reading websites popped most of us in scanlation didn’t give a shit – we scanlated because we loved the manga we work on and wanted people to read it. To that end the credits page wasn’t about some bizarre method of seeking glory, it was about letting you know where to go to get more. Hell, I agree it can be gratuitous to have the individual names, but it’s just as much about “who to blame” as “who did a good job.” More than anything all I used credits pages with my name on for was to prove I wasn’t shit when offering help to other groups.
Now, people who do scanlation probably know there’s a dichotomy between self-dubbed “speed scanners” and “quality scanners.” The latter were previously just the norm, but with the ability to obtain Japanese releases the day they’re out, there became a demand for us to be faster. The groups I worked with just said “whatever” and kept our own pace, just with the benefit of getting the raws earlier. Conversely, speed scanners saw the demand and rose to it in order to provide the final product within a few hours.
Is either method better? Not inherently, but speed scanners in general started taking shortcuts to be the first group out, as being second to another group was “unacceptable” – despite it not having to be a competition. These groups could work together to get something they like to the people who share the enthusiasm. Instead we had people using destructive editing to be first.
Page tearing to get the raw pages flat to scan as quickly as possible, no translation checking or proofreading, often having the translator do the typesetting, burning out details by turning the contrast too high to avoid hard cleaning, guassian blurring to hide the sharpening artefacts, white boxes over translucent bubbles, leaving pages unaligned. These aren’t picked up because there’s no QC process. These are people who do not care about what they’re scanning. They care about glory.
So now manga reader sites pop up and suddenly their IRC channel isn’t full of adoration, and their website isn’t smothered with comments. So they get angry. They make these destructive, shitty scans and then put a watermark on it, but this doesn’t work, so they made the watermarks bigger.
What happened to caring about getting that thing you love to be seen by more people? Now it’s about being some kind of manga superstar and fuck the artist’s hard work I’mma shove a big shitty watermark over it. Isn’t that a little pathetic?
10/10
This post lacks huehuehue other than that it’s beautiful.
I did QC in the past, and 2hrs is no exaggeration.
QC shouldn’t take more than 24 minutes
if it does whoever did the original work sucks dick
also we don’t really QC
Shut up and get back to work herkz
Since you aren’t making money from DDL with recent filehosting business why not host the episodes on medaifire?
Yeah I know 200mb limit, but thats what split rars are for and it would give some relief to the distro server while keeping the ddl traffic. Or maybe I’m retarded and that breaks video files, but its an idea.
It’s really inconvenient. Fileserve had a drag and drop FTP upload service. Using Mediafire would mean actually going to their site and clicking around on buttons.
Just use plowshare or some other CLI tool.
Write a small script that checks the filesize, of the release and splits it into archives using some CLI archiver (such as 7z). Have it then upload to mediafire using plowshare. Something like this isn’t longer than some 10 lines of bash code and can be ran straight from your distro server.
Not that you actually have to do any of this – the guys at animetosho have had some setup like this going on for months, it leeches all anime releases under 1GB from TT and uploads them to a variety of hosters.
Coalguys scanlated once just so they could say it isn’t hard at all. I would love to see you guys do something like that.
http://www.mediafire.com/?k8ed5ld5suf1omi
Made by two bored staff members quite a few months ago.
While I found that particular watermark and the way they did it rather funny when I first saw it, I do agree with you guys. I do some scanning of my own and I loathe seeing watermarks. If you want a credits page for the work you did, fine, but don’t put it on the work itself since you weren’t the original author to begin with.
Is that Money Raised count for January accurate?