>Tim:
>
>>  >So: anyone else keeping up with the DVD boxes?
>>
>>I'm a little behind--I still need to get season 2.
>>
>>I've kinda given up on season 6 and 7, as Viz is going the 3 episode route.
>
>I'll admit I haven't kept up with these either (mainly because the boxes
>are taking my money), but plan to get them eventually because I doubt
>they'll be remade into boxes.  The boxes really aren't that much better as
>far as episodes, since they have 4 on most of the disks.  Ranma wasn't that
>high-quality to begin with, so they could've gone the way they did with
>Key: the Metal Idol and put 6-8 on each one..

I'm not thinking they will put them in a box, either. It's just way 
too expensive for seasons 6 and 7 of Ranma, IMO. Ranma is fairly old, 
and season 6 and 7 start getting really, really repetitive. I might 
buy the last DVD (the one with Nodoka showing up).

>  >I'm not happy about how lazy Viz is with the boxsets, either--they
>>appear to be using the dub masters, with the hard subs, but it is
>>priced better.
>
>I hate to sound stupid, but what are these 'hard subs' that anime fans are
>always talking about?  I haven't bothered watching the subtitled portions
>of any of my DVDs yet, so don't really know.

Hard subs are subtitles that are embedded into the actual video 
stream. The DVD-Video format has built in support for player 
generated subtitles, which are better, because you can turn them off, 
if you want to (hard subs are burned on the video stream).

The other disadvantage of hard subs is the fact that it can cause the 
overall quality of the video to suffer--the MPEG-2 encoder has to 
account for the hard subs, and since hard subs are radically 
different than the rest of the video (no gradual change, subs are not 
continuous areas of solid color), more bits have to be devoted to 
encoding that part of the video.

Also, with Viz, the hard subs do not match the font of the player 
generated subs (DVD subs are just 4 color bitmaps that the player 
displays, if you didn't know).

The fact that the hard subs are on the DVDs tell me that Viz just 
took the masters they made for the dub and dumped that on to DVD. For 
a counter example, with Blue Seed and Sorcerer Hunters, ADV went back 
and made sure that everything was soft-subbed (ie, using the player 
generated subs).
-- 

--Tim
tenton@mac.com
tyeh@tenton.org
ICQ#: 83076226
#113 on the Megumi Hayashibara Internet Fan Club
<http://www.tenton.org>