Thursday, July 12, 2012

Lovedol ~ Lovely Idol 01 - The Poor Man's Idolm@ster


(Image not necessarily indicative of show content)

And now, for something completely different that not many people care about, here's the first episode of Lovedol ~ Lovely Idol, a Fall 2006 anime about... idols and stuff. But mostly stuff. If you want to see an anime about lovely, hardworking, talented girls striving for a goal, all with great animation and a wide variety of music, then I highly recommend The Idolm@ster from Summer 2011. This show... well, I was initially drawn to it by the Princess Soft game origin and the Aoi Nishimata (Final Approach, Shuffle!, We Without Wings) character designs. And while it did deliver cute girls doing cute things, it didn't deliver a whole lot else.

Still, my philosophy is that even marginal/mediocre anime deserve good subtitles. This release uses the Chinese DVD-rips by A.M.E. and English subs from the only group brave enough to translate the series, We are IN Denial. And, well, no offense to those involved, but I didn't care for WinD's subbing style. Things like fragmented timing, overliteral editing (names often used instead of "you"), mistranslations, and tiny/marginless text made the episodes a bit of a chore to watch. So, I found many "opportunities for improvement."

Batch (Nyaa) || Batch (BakaBT)

More info on file technical details and subtitle changes is available at the torrent link. Although these raws are encoded in XviD, they still look better than the TV-rips. They do have a framerate issue, so if anyone can create new encodes or find better raws (like these?), let me know.

12 comments:

  1. Thanks for doing this! ^^

    Don't know how I'll ever repay you.

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  2. Well, Zallis, I tried to find our old scripts(WinD's) but evidently they died in one of our many FTP crashes. I've still got one more place to look... It would save you the time of OCR'ing them, but I'm not sure I can find them, so don't get your hopes up quite yet... Also, are you planning on doing the last ep? It's basically a karaoker's nightmare lol

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  3. I'd love to help with transcoding the raws although I am having trouble finding any.

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    Replies
    1. The raws I'm using are these. If you think it's possible to correct the framerate and keep roughly the same quality, go for it. Otherwise, lossy -> lossy transcodes are generally discouraged by the "anime scene," so if possible, better raws or new encodes from .iso would be ideal.

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    2. Thanks, Ill try to download them and take a look at the files. I can't even find the dvd's to buy so getting decent raws may be pretty near impossible.

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    3. okay I downloaded your lovelyidol ep1 and managed to do a test transcode and fps fix but I dont know how acceptable the quality is. Its going to take a while to finish getting the raws so I used your episode as a test.

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  4. Here's the WMV9 raws (the same as you link on arearaw):

    http://jumbofiles.com/3retc0yf7dih
    http://jumbofiles.com/kghrmrhbmpox
    http://jumbofiles.com/lbqymsu2wwch
    http://jumbofiles.com/tue6hj9y9tja
    http://jumbofiles.com/c1pev5dkqukp
    http://jumbofiles.com/3gp5chrv3xob
    http://jumbofiles.com/p63hl8e7djrk
    http://jumbofiles.com/6xnz1i0k4ndt
    http://jumbofiles.com/enzyp7gcyf4j
    http://jumbofiles.com/atawddxdlk3n
    http://jumbofiles.com/s9nzhje7kb34
    http://jumbofiles.com/jxr4crxnmdrl
    http://jumbofiles.com/nz3odak8vd08

    Whether it's worth using them is up to you.
    Pro: no framerate issue
    Con: WMV9 instead of Xvid
    Screen comparison

    I also have DVDISO for the 2nd volume (episodes 3 and 4), but not the other volumes, so it is quite useless.

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  5. dang I'd say just stick with the xvids after looking at those .. if its not going to be h264 best to stick with xvid because wmv playback doesn't always work correctly(seek crashing for example)...

    the fps in the xvids are fine the audio just needs the correct delay setting for every even number episode.

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  6. Hmm, the wmv files do seem to have less blur / more details, especially in the all-important wood grain and roof tile scenes that everybody watches anime for these days. But ep 01 wouldn't work on MPC (CCCP 10-10-10), and even WMP said I had to download a codec for it.

    So the audio in the even-numbered episodes of the AME files is off? By roughly how much, would you say?

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    Replies
    1. about -500ms delay setting for all even numbered episodes, The odd numbered episodes all seem to be fine. You'll want to set the display resolution to 853x480(correct 16:9) for all the files too.

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  7. Thank! ReDone Subs!

    Why? Don't seed ep 01.

    ReplyDelete