We're back at it. This time we're tackling Pollyanna Story. Yet another orphan girl, however this time our Protagonist gets to go live with her Aunt Polly out in Vermont.
I'll be releasing these in sets of 10 like I did last time, aside from the final release which will contain 11 episodes to finish it off. They'll be released as we get things done.
As far as the OCR process this time it was pretty straight forward. No major curve balls tossed at me this time. Single color and an easy to read font.
The Translation isn't the worst we've dealt with, but not the best either. Thankfully the DVDs include Japanese subtitles. They've helped Darkonius make some sense of the insanity. We did consider redoing the OP and ED, but decided to leave it alone. To much extra work.
Now on to the encoding. To be blunt it's been hell. The Dvds aren't the best. To start with they're tossing 4 or 5 episodes onto a DVD5. Dot crawl is a big issue. Even in the old encodes you could see it. I did manage to clean it up. I decided losing what little grain we had was worth the trade off. Took quite a bit of trial and error to finally find a set of filters that actually worked. I wound up with a temporal denoiser/degrain combo to fix it. None of the normal dot crawl filters seemed to do anything. Also added a light de-rainbow filter to fix the bit of rainbow it had. Nothing major.
However That was only for the first 15 episodes. Starting with episode 16 they switched from 30 FPS Interlaced to VFR Progressive for reasons I do not know. They did manage an overall improvement on the Image quality, but they introduced a lot of frame blending. That was a pain to solve. Mostly it was just finding the right settings to reduce judder. A lot more Trial and error
This show certainly takes more time in the editing and QC department. Because Licca encoded the whole show at 29.97fps, the timings in the OCR are all off from the original hardsubs. Add to that the already questionable timing work Licca did, and you basically have to retime the whole thing. While the OCR itself is somewhat clean, the choice of typeface in the hardsub creates a considerable number of minor errors like commas turning into periods, apostrophes disappearing, random capitalization and the like. Nothing terrible, but it's still time-consuming work, and much more prominent than in our earlier OCRs. And yeah, the translation quality and QC varied from episode to episode, requiring some TLC and corrections of previous mistakes.
Because of all this I can already say that this project is going to take longer than previous projects, so don't be surprised if releases aren't as frequent. We hope to make it up with more WMT in the future.
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