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written by unanimated and, as such, not representing anybody else's views |
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I'm gonna go ahead and call some people out on their bullshit. Certain individuals (like herkz and jdp — as is usually the case with bullshit like this) have been going around claiming that Vivid is pretty much Commie. They get joined by people like Dork Sage, another person notorious for talking nonsense. Why am I writing this? I don't particularly care about this whole thing, and I certainly don't waste my time posting on websites or arguing much in irc channels, but every now and then, when the noise gets too loud, I feel like throwing in my two cents, and I like writing. It is also somewhat sad that the ones who are the most full of shit are usually the loudest, and a lot of people who have no insight into the background of things end up believing all kinds of nonsense. So this way, those who hear rumours and don't really know what's behind them will have a chance to get some real information, instead of just watching people with too much ego make wild claims and baseless accusations. Having been in Commie for over 2 years, and being one of the founders of Vivid, I think I might have some insight into this whole issue. So, why is this "Vivid is Commie" claim being made? What do the groups have in common? How are they different? As for the shouting coming from Commie, one thing is certain: if Vivid was releasing poor quality subs, the Commie guys wouldn't be making this connection. But since Vivid is releasing stuff of generally higher quality than Commie (don't worry — there's plenty of evidence to support that claim), this shouting feels like Commie's desperate attempt at taking credit for something they actually couldn't achieve on their own, especially since the loudest ones themselves are responsible for the poorest quality releases within Commie. When Vivid gets a good rating somewhere, you can expect herkz to appear claiming that it's Commie anyway or saying, "enjoy you're Commie". Of course, you won't hear this from the guys in Commie who can actually produce a decent script (skiddiks, Margaan...). It's always mainly herkz and jdp, whose own editing skills are on the level of Chihiro, (i.e., "Let's not edit anything much. That way we won't fuck up much"). Well, they still fuck up enough, but we'll get to that later. All in all, it looks like a lot of hurt feelings about someone deciding to release good quality subs under another name instead of under Commie. As for Dork Sage, well, he's plain stupid, so let's just ignore him. So what do Vivid and Commie have in common? Shared members? Sure. We share members. Vivid also shares members with UTW, Underwater, Interrobang, FFF, gg, EveTaku, WhyNot, GotWoot, Anime-Koi, Asenshi, and probably others. Commie, of course, shares members with most of the above, plus some others, like Sage, etc. Strangely, I don't hear people going around claiming that UTW is Commie or that Vivid is gg. Vivid also has a bunch of members who have nothing to do with Commie at all. To see just how much overlap there really is, let's look at what Commie is doing this season. According to showtimes, 20 shows. Out of those, only 4 have Vivid members working on them, so that means 80% of Commie releases are completely unrelated to Vivid. Out of the remaining 4, 3 have only timing/typesetting contribution from Vivid members, which I seriously doubt any viewer would count as something that makes two groups' releases similar. So as for the actual content, the only overlap is that Kyhz edits one Commie show and one Vivid show, and even that is diluted by the fact that in Commie it's only him, while in Vivid he gets QCed by 3 people, as you will see below. So according to these facts, the correlation between the two groups is about 5%. Now, is there anything else that Vivid has in common with Commie? That's a good question. I'm not really sure. Let's make some distinctions first, for the sake of clarity. Who is Commie, and who is Vivid? Commie has about 40 people on staff and is therefore far from consistent about anything. Most of those people, however, just edit/time/typeset their shows and pay little attention to anything else. The ones who make Commie what it is — the ones who determine the "policies", the "core Commie" — are only a handful of people. I would say it's RHE, jdp, herkz, and brainchild. They set the "rules" the others pretty much aren't allowed to change. So when I talk about "Commie" and their "policies", it's not something everyone in Commie believes in; it's something these few guys believe in and others follow. Who is Vivid? Vivid has about 6 stable members who consistently work on things every season, and about 6 others who've been active during some seasons, depending on how stuff works out. Who makes Vivid what it is, is pretty much Xythar, Devana, and I. Translators, of course, contribute to whatever show they work on, though unlike in Commie, scripts in Vivid often get edited so much that there's hardly anything left of the translator's style. Now, let's look at some things that we can compare, and let's start with what usually makes the difference between groups, from viewers' perspective. Honorifics (duh): Commie policy: Never, ever, under any circumstances, use honorifics, and constantly mock and talk trash about anybody who does (except if it's Vivid — in which case, claim that it's basically Commie — and no, I do not have a clue how this makes sense). Removing honorifics makes up a significant portion of all editing in Commie (in herkz's case, about 80% and in jdp's case, 95%). Vivid policy: We don't care about honorifics. It's up to the editor to decide, and so far nobody's been adamantly insisting that honorifics should or shouldn't be used for any particular show. For some we use them, for some we don't. Xythar likes to make people happy, so he often includes two tracks. I, personally, don't get why it's such an issue. Song styling: Commie policy: Never, ever, under any circumstances, use romaji or do karaoke, and constantly mock and talk trash about anyone who does (except if it's Vivid, etc.). Vivid policy: Karaoke - no policy. Romaji - I think we've done it on all shows, since it's not that much trouble and people like to sing along, I guess. Karaoke is up to whoever is styling the song, and none of us really care whether the song ends up having karaoke or not. Localization(?): Commie policy: Localize everything, don't ever leave in any Japanese word, no matter how common it is in the West, change Japanese foods to pizza if you have to, change "tsundere" to "hot'n'cold" or something stupid like that, etc. It doesn't matter whether the localization makes any sense or not, as long as you get rid of the Japanese word. Vivid policy: Uh... make things understandable to viewers? There's no policy on "localization". The viewer should understand the scene without any special knowledge or TL Notes, but there's no need to fanatically dejapanize the script and remove words that everyone knows and turn them into something that makes no sense. Memes: Commie: I don't have to explain this... Vivid: No. I think there was one that got in when Xythar wasn't around, and he wasn't too happy about that... Trolling: Commie: Trolling is generally encouraged, as well as breaking things with laggy typesetting, or just about anything else that will piss people off. From herkz's comments, I gather that the more people he pisses off with his releases, the happier he is. Vivid: No bullshit, no weird things "just for the heck of it", no "funny" lines that aren't justified translation-wise. Um... fonts? (Yeah, whatever. Let's throw it in.) Commie: LT Finnegan master race. Vivid: Fuck LT Finnegan. (OK, that's more me than Vivid, but yeah.) Linebreaks? Commie: Nuke all linebreaks! Don't ever use linebreaks, even if lines break in really dumb places. (Yes, that's Finnegan.) Vivid: Devana/unanimated: we don't break one-liners unless they're hard to read because they're long for the time allocated (and neither timing nor phrasing can be changed any more). For two-liners, we move the breaks to logical places, like before "and" in the Commie screenshot above. Xythar/Daiz: full linebreak madness with alpha autism (you don't even wanna know what that is). (Yes, I make fun of them for this, but I let them do it on shows they pick, while on shows Devana and/or I pick, we do things our way.) I don't know... "other stuff"? Commie: Use double contractions whenever possible, use contractions that don't make any sense, like "there're" or "this's", ignore characters' personality, fuck consistency, make characters swear whether it's appropriate or not (usually it's not), fuck up EME (Early Modern English) every time (unless they ask me to check it), etc. Dialogue lines often reflect the editor's personality more than the character's. (Commie trademark) Vivid: A lot of care goes into keeping things consistent and paying attention to characters' personality. Dialogue lines reflect what the characters are like, not what we are like or what we think is cool. We also get EME right every time. (OK, that one's not important, but I'm just adding it for fun.) Attitude / relationships with other groups: Commie: The core Commie is extremely elitist, and in their view, everything that's not Commie is shit. One exception is gg, the one group that Commie somehow finds acceptable (also apparently the only group that trolls more than Commie, so I guess that makes sense). Seeing as they claim that Vivid is Commie, I suppose Vivid is acceptable too, but I'm not really sure. What I am sure about is that 'core Commie' has nothing but contempt for all the other groups, including the ones they share members with. They spend more time talking shit about other groups than they spend editing their releases. It's ironic because Commie used to be all about editing, but half of current Commie releases are practically unedited (those that jdp/herkz "edit"). Vivid: We communicate and work together with a lot of groups out there. We help each other instead of going around and saying, "We did this and that, and you stole it from us", like jdp, who ironically doesn't really do anything. We share things between groups (caps, scripts), and it's common for people to ask more experienced members of other groups for advice. TLC/QC: Commie: Almost never TLC and almost never QC, because it's a waste of time. (Except it isn't, because it shows on the quality.) Vivid: Always TLC and QC. QC significantly contributes to the quality of the subs. (This is a significant difference between the groups, but more on that later.) Looking at this now, I have to ask myself: what the hell do these two groups have in common? There's hardly anything to connect the two. Come to think of it, even my own work is different for each group. I used to make effort at improving Commie releases, but I gave up because it's not encouraged and, if anything, my efforts were more likely to get sabotaged by incompetent people than appreciated. Commie cares a lot more about releasing quickly than maintaining any level of quality. If you're trying your best and everyone else on the team is not giving a fuck, there's a point when you just have to stop. The main reason for creating Vivid was to get away from this. Anyway, most of the previous stuff was just cosmetics. Now we're slowly getting to what I see as the main difference(s). Leadership / organization of work / what it's all about: I may seem to be going off the track a bit here, but it's necessary to explain the background in order to understand how things work in each group. Commie: Commie leadership is officially (I guess) RHE, jdp, and herkz. Practically it's herkz-slash-anarchy. RHE used to be an actual leader. He was the one who made sure things got done, actually did some QCing, cared about what his group released, encoded everything (sometimes like 6 shows on one day), and shouted like a madman when people were slacking or making too many mistakes. As messed up as it sometimes was, those were really the good days. I think he actually made Commie better than it would have been without him — back then. Unfortunately (after an intermediate phase when he was mostly shouting "Don't fucking highlight me you niggers!"), today he can only be classified as a useless faggot who plays games all day long and has no fucking clue what goes on in Commie. I know; it's harsh. But I can assure you that nobody in Commie will dispute what I just said. I don't think he even knows what shows Commie is doing this season. Then there's jdp, the laughing stock even in Commie, because unlike rhe, he was never useful in the first place. Even inside Commie it's a mystery why he's a part of the leadership. It just makes no sense. In the last 2 years, he edited one show, and by edited, I mean this. (Left is HorribleSubs, right is jdp's "edit".) You can see the irony in his being the most vocal about criticizing other groups for their work. (Some people out there say that Commie is just retimed Crunchyroll. Well, in the case of jdp, they are correct.) So what's left is herkz. As you all know, herkz is a one-man fansub group who encodes, times, typesets, and "edits", all on his own. We'll get to the quality of that later. He's the one who somewhat sees to things getting done and keeps track of what goes on. If you need to know the status of something in Commie, he's the most likely to know. Mostly though, Commie is an anarchy coordinated by python scripts. Workflow is something like this: Rip HS script (or translate on a pad). Editor edits or "edits" it, often in under an hour; timer times it at the same time (always those timing puns); typesetter typesets at the same time. (It usually goes in some sequence only if one of them can't make it until later, but then, the order really isn't important here.) Then, after the last one finishes, somebody merges the scripts together, nobody checks anything, and muxing/releasing is attempted via scripts. If the script tells them they fucked shit up, somebody has to go and (To illustrate Commie mentality: Even if the script lists problems with the release, there's no serious effort to fix them all. Instead, they just try to change the necessary minimum to fool the script, and the problems mentioned by the script often remain and make it to the Wall of Shame.) In short, get things done as quickly as possible, don't waste time checking anything, and go back to playing games or whatever. Of course, not everyone in Commie is like that; the dedication depends on each individual (after all, Xythar and I are in Commie too), but that's the general gist of it. The things that are important before stuff gets released: there must be no Japanese, romaji, karaoke, honorifics, or linebreaks. Other than that, nobody really cares. I stopped caring too (in Commie) because trying to fix things after a bunch of irresponsible kids who don't give a fuck is more trouble than it's worth. Vivid: I see Vivid as not having or needing "leadership". I don't like the whole "one guy decides and tells others what to do" idea, and we make decisions together. As founders, though, Xythar and I feel responsible for pretty much everything that goes on in the group. We see to it that everything gets done without unnecessary delays, but since the whole point of creating Vivid was to not have to deal with incompetent people and half-assed work, we don't have to remind anyone about anything; everyone does what they signed up for on their own. Workflow: Editing+QC in Vivid takes about 3-6 hours (occasionally more) because we actually edit our scripts, rather than just do spellcheck and remove honorifics. That gives the timer plenty of time to time (more timing puns), and me enough time to typeset. Somewhere along the way, every script gets TLCed. Every script gets one proper QC pass on the pad, making suggestions to the editor, who then goes through them and uses whatever seems like an improvement. Once it goes from pad to aegisub, I watch through every single Vivid episode, doing my "QC" pass. I wouldn't call it proper QC, since I mostly leave editing issues to Xythar/Devana, but I check the timing on every episode, recheck my signs several times, import and check OP/ED, make chapters if needed, try to spot any mistakes in the script, and make suggestions if a line doesn't sound natural enough to me or if I happen to have a better idea. Devana QCs every single script for anything related to editing, including how much time there is to read each line, whether the line fits the character speaking, whether terms, grammar, punctuation, and everything else is consistent with previous episodes, etc. Xythar QCs everything unless his schedule doesn't allow it, as in, he has another show on the same day and has to leave for work after that. I think that was the case with, like, one and a half shows. He's usually the last one to touch the script, so he QCs everything — script, typesetting, encode, all up to checking the muxed file for fonts. He releases the episode if he has time; otherwise I do it. So as you can see, every script gets a TLC pass and 2-3 QC passes, and we do our best to make the script as good as possible. The fact that three people, instead of just one person, look at and try to improve the script makes a hell of a difference. And that leads to the crux of the matter, the real difference between Commie and Vivid: the actual quality of the subs. Quality: Obviously, my opinion is that Vivid's releases present, on average, a higher quality of subs than Commie's. To make that clearer, I would say that Commie's releases can be anywhere between really good and pretty damn bad. After all, with 40 people on staff, you can't expect everything to be the same. In Vivid, the quality is consistently in the range of the best releases in Commie. If you just read the previous section, you'll understand why. We don't cut corners anywhere. We don't release some shows with crappy subs just because somebody is too lazy or lacks the skills to do it properly. Xythar, Devana, and I work pretty much on every episode of every show, and each of us tries to improve the release instead of just going, "K, did my part. See you later." We're not trying to be the fastest. We don't release thinking "I could check again, but it's probably fine, so I'll just release it". We do check again. Sure, it takes longer than in Commie, but the releases will be out there for years, so I don't see how releasing an hour earlier with a bunch of mistakes is any kind of gain. So, what do the releases really look like? Surely just because there's more effort doesn't mean it's really better, right? Well, let's look at some more facts. As you may or may not know, there's this thing called the Commie Wall of Shame with screenshots of mistakes in Commie releases. Recently I had to start scaling down the images and to split the Wall into smaller sections because the amount of memory needed to load the page was a bit too much. The Wall rapidly expanded after I watched two shows "edited" by herkz. (I kind of knew his editing wasn't great, but I didn't expect it to be this bad) Altogether, there are about 440 images now, out of which about 220 are from herkz's shows, mostly just three shows. I would say that if you have 50 mistakes in one show, you're doing something wrong. Considering how much time herkz spends laughing at Crunchyroll's (and random other people's) bad editing, I wonder why he doesn't spend as much time on his own editing. If CR is so terrible, how come the episodes from CR edited by him still have most of the mistakes? While claiming that he knows how English works, abundant evidence shows that his grasp of grammar is rather poor. An even bigger mystery is jdp, the main proponent of this "Commie over everything else" attitude, acting as if it were somehow his achievement (and as if it was real in the first place) while his whole contribution to Commie is changing 5 words a week in Space Bros. At least herkz is still 100 times more capable than him. jdp acts like he's part of this elitist minority that's better than the majority, while not only is that majority better than him in the first place, but he also has no role in the achievements of that minority. So his saying that Vivid is another Commie is saying that a group of dedicated people who spend several hours working on a script is the same as somebody removing honorifics and calling it editing. Honestly, I could write a lua script that would edit just as well as jdp. Then there is this strange guy called brainchild. He, unlike jdp, actually edits scripts and improves them noticeably, and unlike herkz, he actually knows English grammar. Unfortunatelly, he has rougly 3 problems. 1. He has no sense for characters' personality. (Either that, or he doesn't give a fuck. Also, herkz has the same problem on top of all the others.) He uses slang, colloquialisms, or curse words for class presidents who speak politely and properly, or just about any kind of language for anyone. This makes his lines, while grammatically correct, sometimes look more out of place than herkz's lines that disregard grammar. 2. He does really stupid things because he thinks they're cool. This includes trolling, memes, etc., and is even more out of place than his mischaracterization. This makes the subs hard to watch because that crap is way too distracting. He might actually become a good editor (unlike the other two) if he dropped this nonsense and started taking it a bit seriously. 3. He doesn't believe in QC and can't be bothered proofreading his stuff, so he still ends up on the Wall of Shame pretty often. In Vivid, we do batches, so the mistakes get found and corrected for them. As far as I know, we've only had 3 or 4 blunders in our 6 shows and some OVAs. That's about the same amount in 6 full shows that herkz has in one episode. I challenge anyone to find 5 real mistakes in a Vivid release. If we had 50 mistakes in one show, I would probably quit. As I said before, Commie has some decent editors too, and some releases are pretty good, but it's certainly not those put out by the ones claiming that Vivid is Commie. It's their wishful thinking that Commie could somehow be compared to Vivid. It really can't. Not any more than any other two groups can. The common theme is that both groups are putting subtitles on the screen, but that's about as far as the similarity goes. There's virtually nothing that makes Vivid anything like Commie. No matter which part of the process you look at, everything is different, and so are the results. Don't get me wrong, though. When I joined Commie, it was definitely one of the best groups out there, but as of now, I see it more as a sinking ship. With current leadership, its chances of getting better are pretty much zero. I suspect certain people in Commie live in their own worlds, completely disconnected from reality. When herkz was trying to convince people that Vivid's c3-bu team is practically Commie, despite the fact that both the editor and the QC had no connection to Commie whatsoever, he said, "vivid's c3-bu is probably not that good because of the qc [...] i bet most of it is futsuu". One could forgive him for thinking so, because he's probably basing that on his own "editing" of Futsuu's TL, which looks like this. He changed "miniscule" to "minuscule", which is pretty pointless because they mean the same thing, and "guys are" to "guys're", which is even more pointless because it's stupid. Correcting actual mistakes would be too much effort, though, so the episode ended up on the Walls of Shame about ten times, just like most of the others. Now, back to "i bet most of it is futsuu". Here's a sample of how c3-bu was edited in Vivid. This is what it looks like when somebody actually edits. herkz has probably never seen anything like that, so he thinks what he's doing is editing. The sad irony is that he's the person who Anyway, this shows you that the Vivid-is-Commie people don't even know what they're talking about. They're just pulling ideas out of their asses. In conclusion, I'm pretty sure there are a few groups out there that have more in common with Vivid than Commie does, and similarities between Commie and Vivid are practically nonexistent. |
