Saturday, May 3, 2014

Yawara: Back to the Beginning

FroZen-EviL just released episode 1 of Yawara! Does that mean we're going back to the beginning and redoing the 58 episodes done by Live-evil? The answer, alas, is no. This is a one-shot... probably.

The encoder for Yawara! is currently attending university in Japan, and he found a disc called Yawara: Special Selections. This consists of four random episodes, including episode 1. The attraction is that episodes have been remastered. So he couldn't resist encoding the first episode, just to see how it looked, and then he persuaded the rest of the old team to jump back in. This episode is the result, and it looks very good indeed. No more film burn at the scene changes, no more washed out colors, no more random jumpiness in the image. This is what Yawara! should look like.

Although the subtitles are from the R1 DVD, they were translation checked by kokujin-kun and then edited by me. kokujin-kun did full typesetting. Juggen, CP, and Saji checked the results, and Skr encoded. It was fun to get back to Yawara-chan and also to do a proper job on the amazing first OP and ED.

Will there any more? "It depends." If the Special Selections are going to be random episodes released as random promotions, probably not. But why would anyone go to the trouble of remastering Yawara! without more ambitious plans? Do these releases presage, perhaps, a BluRay version? Now that would be something to consider.

However, redoing Yawara! from BluRays would be an enormous undertaking. The Live-eviL subtitles are lost, so episodes 1-40 would probably use the R1 DVD subtitles. Episode 41-58 would need to be OCR'd from the Live-eviL releases. And then episodes 59-124 would use the current softsubs. The disparate sources mean that there would be serious consistency issues to resolve. And could the team be content with the simplistic typesetting that we used before, now that everyone has seen what real typesetting looks like? Hard to say.

All this is hypothetical. Meanwhile, here's a change to visit with Yawara-chan at the outset of her career, when a chance encounter with a purse-snatcher and a captured photograph of some white pantsu will change history. Enjoy episode 1!