[quote="Otviss":26ci4oa9]In the question "Would you prefer good quality subs or do you want to see episodes being released quicker", i had three answers to choose from. "More frequently" "No preference" "Well done sub". And that’s exactly where the dilemma lies.[/quote:26ci4oa9]
I think when you say "Good quality sub" most people are going to assume you mean translation quality, which will suffer if people are forced to make rush decisions on how best to interpret a line from Japanese to English.
[quote:26ci4oa9]As i’m a typesetter, and you are too, i find it much more important to make an episode LOOK good with the extra hour of effort thrown in there. Notice the last picture in the album i sent you. That’s all arial, and was not chosen by myself.[/quote:26ci4oa9]
The last picture, I think the main issue is legibility as the font and border weight is thin, so the text is getting lost on the black shadow. I tend to always set Arial to bold and make the white border thicker.
I think the the real vital thing is the colours, a few deaf Gaki viewers have said they greatly appreciate that, it’s like a pseudo speaker label.
As an artist, I understand where you’re coming from though. I guess one option would be to have the fancy stuff for the hardsub then open the sub in Notepad, and replace the fonts with "Arial" (or copy-paste some all-purpose Arial styles). I tend to stick to Arial as it’s a san-serif font which makes it easiest to read. Those super stylized Kanji they sometimes do are a right pain for my text capture thing to even recognize. It’s largely a functionality thing, back in the day chairs were super ornate and fancy, then Bauhaus design came along, now they’re more boring but also very functional for multiple uses.
[quote:26ci4oa9]But if you want to choose between a 700mb video file and separate arial based subs with lesser overall quality and feel as opposed to a 700mb video file complete with custom fonts, nice effects and satisfying feel. What are you going to choose? And why choose the first? That’s my reasoning.[/quote:26ci4oa9]
I tend to like soft subs for Gaki due to already having the raws. Re-encoding takes a hit to the quality and the text tends to be crisper as it’s hardware-based font rendering not pixels. I haven’t made many softsubs for obscure stuff I’ve done though since no-one is likely to have the raws.
I think some would opt for the softsub so they can have the option to show or hide the text to see what’s underneath (the cast or Kanji), in that case they won’t mind how it looks so long as it’s removable.