The night the sub encoder died mid-session at AnimeExpo

I was running a fansub panel in a tiny room at AnimeExpo 2019, maybe 30 people there. About 10 minutes in, my laptop fan went crazy and the screen went black. The encoder software had corrupted the subtitle file during a save. I pulled out my phone, opened a text editor, and retyped the whole script line by line while someone else stalled with trivia. Took me 20 minutes but we finished the screening with no more crashes. Has anyone else had to rebuild subtitle timing on the fly during a con panel?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancyjones16d ago

That "retyped the whole script line by line on your phone" bit really stuck with me. Did you manage to keep the line breaks and timing tags straight in your head while typing on a phone keyboard, or were you just focusing on getting the text right and hoping the timing would sort itself out later? Seems like the kind of thing where one wrong tap could mess the whole flow.

logan56116d ago

bro "retyped the whole script line by line on your phone" that is some next level dedication. I've had to rebuild timing on the fly before and it's always a nightmare. One time I had a sub file get corrupted right before a panel and I had to sync subs to the bluray timecodes using a stopwatch on my watch while the video played. It was rough, ended up being off by like half a second for some lines but nobody noticed because everyone was just glad it worked.

jamief6716d ago

That "nobody noticed because everyone was just glad it worked" part rings true. I've been in that spot where you're just trying to get something functional, not perfect. What worked for me when I had to do that kind of last minute fix was to sync the first line then check a line near the middle and one near the end. If those three points were close enough, the rest usually fell in line well enough that nobody complained. Half a second off is actually pretty good for doing it that way. Most people don't pick up on small timing differences unless they're really looking for them. You did better than you think.