A day in a fansubber's life
Just to start, this problem is okay now, I just wanted to tell you guys a story to give you an idea of what we do to make these subs. So here's your peak behind the kimono.
This is a story about capping Garo -Makai Retsuden- 08.
So a couple days ago, Luna let me know that Garo might get delayed because of the ?French tennis stuff airing. Since Garo airs at the sensible time of 1:23 AM Friday night, this stuff becomes a nuisance during times of international sports because that's when people around the globe are wake. (I'm pretty sure we've lost raws to Ping Pong tournaments before)
I volunteered to stay up and watch the capper. Since our software and hardware is flaky, unsupported, and sites about it are hit by anti-piracy Japanese agencies, it's pretty amazing that we're able to cap raws at all. Anyway, one nice feature of the program is that it'll give me a schedule of the programs that's updated live. I got up a bit early and saw that Garo was delayed to 2:13 AM. Fine, I set a timer for it to record and go back to sleep.
I get up again during the usual capping time to see if anything's changed. Oh, it's now airing at 1:45 AM, plus the show that airs before Garo is airing now. So there shouldn't be anymore changes to the schedule. I cancel the current recording and restart it, with the intention of manually shutting it down. Then I stop and think "Wait a moment, if I just let this record, the raw file is going to be pretty big. It's already 3-4 gb for a 30 minute show). So I do the sensible thing and set it to start recording at 1:40 instead.
So I go lie down for a nap again. (I sleep a lot on Friday mornings since it's my day off). I get up around 1:50ish and go, oh wait, I should check to make sure it started. Here's where our technology problems comes in. Sometimes the capper doesn't load the video, and in this case, it hadn't. It had been recording 7 minutes of static. I quickly restart the program and start recording, but I missed the first 10 minutes or so.
Luckily, Darkaura saved us with his backup recording. You see, normally Garo airs from 1:23-1:53. So he had the missing footage that we lost. We should be able to stitch them together so no one notices a difference.
But yeah, that's a life in the day of a fansubber.
